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 LastID | Book Title | Composer | Index | Pages | Author | Poem Title | First Lines | Keywords |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
22085 | The Mystique Of Grouse Creek | FC 11 S-64 | 64 | Elden K. Shaw | Uncle Ray | This poem's about my favorite Uncle, Ray, Who lived in a very different time and day, When story telling was considered the norm, And he was a master of this archaic art-form. | ||
22086 | The Mystique Of Grouse Creek | FC 11 S-64 | 66 | Elden K. Shaw | Great Uncle George | Uncle George lived only a stone's throw away, And at times I visited him practically every day. Especially when my brother went to first grade, I oft "helped" him gather the eggs that were laid. | ||
22087 | The Mystique Of Grouse Creek | FC 11 S-64 | 68 | Elden K. Shaw | Rollo James Kimber | Rollow James Kimber was his given name, And though he enjoyed only modest fame, When I was a boy he was a hero to me, Since he was the cowboy I wanted to be. | ||
22088 | The Mystique Of Grouse Creek | FC 11 S-64 | 70 | Elden K. Shaw | Thomas Thomas | One of the earliest settlers of our town, Was a Sheep man of somewhat local renown, Cotton Thomas still has a small calim to fame, Since today the "Basin" bears his unusual name. | ||
22089 | The Mystique Of Grouse Creek | FC 11 S-64 | 73 | Elden K. Shaw | Going Home | Someday I'll go home again. Up the hill and down the lane, To that little house I know so well, Tucked away in that mountain dell. There sitting upon the porch will be, Grandma and Grandpa waiting for me. | ||
22090 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 14 | Slow Falling Rain | Thunder rumbled in my dreams this morning, it was distant but plain. I tried to hold back the day and the dawning, tried to dream us some rain. I heard the horses stampede to the stables, they always know. | ||
22091 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 16 | Uvalde County | Now the days have been many I've drifted these ranges, Many's the night I have slept on the ground, But the sun it won't rise here to darken my shadow, Uvalde County is where I am bound. | ||
22092 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 17 | Laurie Wagner Buyer | Cherry Red Winter | Finite questions bring no absolute answers. The power of mountains stare down daily life. Caravans of buses streak across the globe. A microcosm of ocean-blue swamp begs forgiveness. | |
22094 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 18 | On a June Afternoon | I sit on the stoop eating fresh fruit: bananas and strawberries from Mexico, Anjou pears from Argentina, oranges from California, apples from Oregon. | ||
22095 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 19 | Cotyledon | A slender white arm rises out of the compost, like a ballerina in arabesque. | ||
22096 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 20 | Witness to a Death | A young flicker smashes into the glass of my narrow sunroom window. She falls. A stone to the ground. Rising from winter weeds the wind ruffles orange-shafted feathers. | ||
22097 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 21 | Blizzard Night | Sleeping tucked in with sorrow allows no surface for joy or warmth only the cold edge of anger caught in the heavy thigh that presses mine, the weight of wild worry around. | ||
22098 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 22 | Five-strand with Stays | The fence trembles when I touch it, a barrier to bulls, and cows with calves, to elk that leap over at low spots, and to antelope that bend ballerina bodies to slide under, white bellies brushing sage. | ||
22099 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 23 | Hay Meadow | willow wild redtop river bend butterfly shooting star silver weed snipe wooden bridge foxtail fringed gentian. | ||
22100 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 24 | Jon Chandler | On the Rio Grande at South Fork | The lace-thin leather of the boot's sole succumbs to the erosion of matter, rending microscopically at the point of greatest pressure allowing a gap that ruptures further with each step. | |
22101 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 25 | Texas 1968/1983/1998 | Opal--pregnant with Daryl Horn's child the night she turned fifteen-- doesn't remember much; a little pain, a little blood, the odor of Daryl's old man's English Leather and cigarettes and the way the shadows cast by headlights played. | ||
22102 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 27 | The Once-Gangly Kid Looks Back | Standing before the tiny campfire at dawn shivering from cold and anticipation the smell of the scratchy wool blanket inside the flannel cocoon of the sleeping bag, shielding me from the alpine night. | ||
22103 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 28 | Bob Cherry | Collage with Dark Dog | The prism you tie with thread to the kitchen windowshade is cutglass, a small jewel to separate the colors of light not yet in our winter sky. From each side of the table, we taste out morning tea, wait and watch the dark dog separate itself from blackness. | |
22104 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 29 | Fair Grounds at Fort Worth | Second summer at carnival and Fred and Sally and Cal and Alice and me all went free to ride and hear the calliope. And watch ourselves in the mirrors. | ||
22105 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 31 | Innuendo to a Final Frontier | You see the filching wolverine but only when your fish are gone-- and still she moves alive behind your eyes, where she catches for each of your blurred suspicions of her a full view of you twice. | ||
22106 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 32 | Quartet | Two cranes cried outside the darkened bedroom window last evening, a tide-filling slough separating each from each and me from drunken laugher in the harbor. Fearing night flight. | ||
22107 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 33 | Two Forces | must have worked on stone shards, plain and separate halves from greater rock, tortured, smoothed, and tumbled from the cold stream where I wade like a Sisyphus to his task. | ||
22108 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 34 | Gaydell Collier | Black Hills Evening | Riding low on the western hills the sun throws shadows long long to the rising moon they skip over gullies, slide through treetops reaching thinning stretching. | |
22109 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 35 | Scent of Baskets | Grass grows thick at the horseshoe bend where the creek runs deep peepers trill a dragonfly darts in flashes of blue shadows float upon the water and root-straggles hang from the cutaway bank. | ||
22110 | Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West | Laurie Wagner Buyer & WC Jameson | FC 11 W-30 | 37 | When the Sodergreen House Burned Down | Unlike modern houses framed with concrete and glass, This house was hewn from heartwood with a meaning to its past, When strong men worked with gnarled hands and double-bitted ax To knit the logs together, dove-tailed, and made to really last. |