FOLK COLLECTION 11: The Skaggs Foundation Cowboy Poetry Collection
| Date of Items: | 1890-present | Register Prepared by: | Randy Williams and Susan Gross, April 2004 |
| Register Updated by: | Randy Williams, 23 December 2009 |
| Excel database transfered to MYSQL and uploaded (replacing PHP data): | Colin Jackson, Fall 2010 |
| MYSQL database updated: | Randy Williams, January 2012 |
| Linear Feet: | 20 |
Historical Note & Provenance
Folk Coll 11 is Utah State University's cowboy poetry collection. The collection, originally created by a generation donation by the L. J. and Mary Skaggs Foundation, includes books gathered during a fieldwork project in the early 1980s to document cowboy poetry in the U.S. west (see Folk Coll 11f). From this important fieldwork project came the impetus for the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering held in January 1985 in Elko, Nevada. Since that time, each January, the Fife Folklore Archives staff take the collection and Access database (that details each book, poem, author, first line and key words), to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering for offsite use. Through University purchases and generation donations from poets and collectors, this collection continues to grow.
Scope and Content
The collection consists of 20 linear feet of books on cowboy poetry, including press and self published works. The collection can be accessed through USU Libraries online catalog.
As well, poem titles and keywords found in each book in the collection are included in the database below. To use, type in the search term. Tip: Try and use an uncommon
word from the poem to ensure less "hits." For instance, if you enter "boots" you will get many hits; but if you enter "bones" you will most liley get fewer "hits" or poems and find the item you seek faster.
To return to the search page, click "home" at the bottom of the page.
Search:
Poetry table.
First Previous Next Last| ID | Book Title | Composer | Index | Pages | Author | Poem Title | First Lines | Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22138 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 80 | Milton Parker Looney (1994) | "Light 'em if you have 'em": the fighting Nora's Navy Cross fire controlman is dying, lung cancer, hot as the Christmas lights as his niece's house. In delirium he is back on the Northampton, just before midnight near Guadalcanal. | ||
| 22139 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 81 | George Sibley | Hartman Rocks | I lift my eyes to these hills To see beyond gods and folly; I come out among these rocks To take peace in their absence of plan. In this thrust and boil of stone, Long cooled but still settling out. | |
| 22140 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 82 | Hawks and Haying at Clarke's Ranch | They seemed a team, symbiotic: The silent man on the John Deere, The hawk floating along behind, Waiting for something to dart out Of the over-rolled row of winnowed hay. | ||
| 22141 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 83 | On Driving Past the One Hundred Thousandth Roadkill | These animals sleeping on the shoulder Will one day all wake up and take back the roads. The fish flushed in turbines will run Up the rubble of dams coming down; New feathers will grow through crude gunk. | ||
| 22142 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 84 | West Elks Haiku | the old deacon spruce stood grim but its new greens laughed as they slapped me wet that clawed-up quakie's so old even her bear is some fifty yards dead. | ||
| 22143 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 85 | Larry D. Thomas | Blue Norther | When the wind barreled in, even the mesquite murmured, their roots of tempered steel creaking, clawing deep in the merciless Texas earth, their wood ornery enough. | |
| 22144 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 86 | Forgotten Horseshoe | In far West Texas, foundationed on a flank of the Guadalupe Mountains, just the weathered wooden shell of Williams Ranch. | ||
| 22145 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 87 | Near Pecos | The land brown with drought, branches of mesquite twist to the breaking point. Fresh brands fester, itching the hides of Herefords whose bawling singes hairs. | ||
| 22146 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 88 | Night Goat | The cold rock faces of sheer cliffs shudder, echoing the black arpeggios of bleating. He swaggers up the steep canyon as if he owns the place. | ||
| 22147 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 89 | Sierra Diablo | Near Van Horn, Texas, in the desert, even the living is far more skeleton than flesh; a landscape of yucca flanking rib cages sandblasted, sun-bleached, immaculate. | ||
| 22148 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 90 | Mark Todd | Mountain Roads | The roads I like best struggle to bridge two points strung out rubber thin, like a hat ear to ear, its band tearing free from a warped-fitting brim. | |
| 22149 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 91 | Like Sleep, But Brittle | Like sleep, But brittle, a film that crackles from each toss to turn and then returns to the starch of wakefulness. | ||
| 22150 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 92 | Runaway | well I'd unhooked the trailer just like I'd done a hundred times I chocked the wheels I set the block and cranked it off the hitch. | ||
| 22151 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 94 | Lori Van Pelt | Snowy Range Moon | In dusks's chiaroscuro while sunset drains the day's warmth we sip burgundy from crystal. Clad in down coats and wool socks, we wobble in lawn chairs on cushiony grass and watch constellations uncloack. | |
| 22152 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 95 | Tardy Visitor to the Graveyard | Two cocoons dangle from one budded branch of the Russian olive. Little lanterns yet unlit waiting for luminescence kindled by interior instinct. | ||
| 22153 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 96 | The Deaf Lady Sings | Her garden delights the eyes-- cosmos, roses, irises swinging in the brisk rhythmic wind lilacs, poppies, tulips tapping white wooden picket fence. | ||
| 22154 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 97 | Dale L. Walker | Eldorado | Rough and Ready, serenely isolated among pines and oaks and blackberry brambles, the archetypal placer camp where the mind still sees weary men stirring from their bedrolls at daybreak. | |
| 22155 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 99 | Richard S. Wheeler | After I'm Gone | Will she spread my ashes down in the park, the Lamar Valley, a place I loved where buffalo graze beneath a cloud-patched sky and wolves sun on distant ridges? | |
| 22156 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 100 | Paul Zarzyski | Cowboy Poet Barnstormer | Eighty-nine copies of your latest alliterative lariati title crammed, sans remaining space for one anorectic, iambic molecule of mold or mildew, in the Samsonite Genuine Split Cowhide suitcase you wheedled out of your widow neighbor. | |
| 22157 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 102 | Flowering | Their rump hairs puffed, chrysanthemum antelope blossoms from beds into morning hoarfrost, the rancid scent of carnivore boring through the frozen air of their world so perfectly still. | ||
| 22158 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 104 | Photo Finish | Because a horse cannot see its own nose, the bell mare stares at herself mesmerized in the mirroried glass vet clinic door--fixates so firmly she's distracted from her chronic pain. | ||
| 22159 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 106 | Reminders | Cocktail-hour autumn sun accents every cat-- scratched inch of short stroke, each centimeter-deep groove she racked into Ranch Oak kitched table leg, a stick of asiago chesse or frozen butter. | ||
| 22160 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 108 | The Day Beelzebub Gave His Jezebel a Hotfoot | It was 53 below in Butte, where they were marooned, after the hell-hole it took them an eternity to drive up through froze over, their fire-engine red Firebird vapor-locking to a frigid halt. | ||
| 22161 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 112 | Time Travel | Gravel roads into a black hole canopy of hardwood forest were all the secrets of the cosmos she and I craved in those days before compact cars. We made aerobic love in the king-size back seat of a '56 Buick Roadmaster. | ||
| 22163 | Antlers in the Treetops or Who Goosed the Moose | FC 11 W-38 | 1 | Donald L. Welter | Have you never? | If you've ever rode a ridge-top, as the sun sets in the west. |