Sure, just a week has passed since longhorn cattle moseyed through the Mile High City to launch the , but Denver isn’t the only town where cowboys are congregating this month: Ranchland rhymers are descending on Golden for the 27th annual .
Call them poet lariats or writers of the purple sage, but these men and women put into verse the joys and hardships of life on the range — good horses and bad weather — even though some of them have never spent a minute trailing the north end of a southbound steer.
Seventeen of them are slated to perform in Golden in a four-day festival running Jan. 21-24. The event draws hundreds of fans.
“Just the fact that we’ve survived more than 25 years is amazing,” says , a Denver resident who has performed her work at Lincoln Center in Manhattan and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. “Look at how many festivals have come and gone. We have a really loyal audience.”
Not all the participants are working cowboys or cowgirls, but most have some connection to ranching life. Perhaps they grew up on one, or their grandparents raised cattle. Even those who live in cities tend to have strong rural links, for cowboy poetry was born in the bunkhouse and around campfires on the trail.
Masterson — and yes, she says she is related to frontier lawman Bat Masterson — has worked with the festival since 1990. There are always new faces among the familiar ones in the audience, and she offers a reason for this.
“I think it’s a chance to get away from the high-tech world,” she says. “It’s a way to unplug and get back to simpler times. There is just a lot of variety to the acts, and they are just brilliant wordsmiths.”
And one other thing, Masterson says: “A lot of the poetry is very humorous. I’ve seen people literally fall out of their seats laughing.”
But poetry is just one of the festival’s offerings. There are also singers and yodelers, a skill that was often employed by cowboy singers in the mid-20th century, when the genre out of Nashville was still known as country and Western music.
“The sets run about 20 minutes, so audiences can get to see several acts during an evening,” says Masterson, whose “Roads to Colorado” CD received the Will Rogers Award for Best Western Album of 2009.
One of the favorites is of Westminster.
At 60, the poet and musician has performed for a dozen years. He got his start almost by accident, attending a cowboy poetry event that happened to have an open mic. “I had one poem and one song, but I got up there,” says Mehl, who is also a first-rate guitarist.
Like most cowboy poets, Mehl works in rhyme. It’s considered the aesthetic preference, and also serves as a mnemonic device, since cowboy poets usually recite from memory.
“You’ll find some cowboy poets who compose in free verse, but they’re the exception,” he says.
Robert Frost once said that writing in free verse was like playing tennis without a net. If Frost had ever done any cowboying, he might have likened it to roping steers without a horse.
In 2013, Mehl’s “The Great Divide” was named “Cowboy Poetry CD of the Year” by both the Western Music Association and the Academy of Western Artists.
One of his inspirations is , a native of Las Cruces, N.M., who helped put cowboy poetry on the map in the 1980s. Black is a large-animal veterinarian, and has been a star and a staple at national cowboy events such as the annual one in Elko, Nevada.
“He might be the only poet period in the United States who is making an actual living at it,” Mehl says with a laugh.
of Conifer grew up in Chicago, but has been around horses all her life. Her family kept them back in Illinois, and Knight has worked on ranches and helped guide trail rides.
She has performed as a professional poet since 2010, but has written poems and songs since her teens. She was the Western Music Association’s Female Poet of the Year in 2014 and won the WMA’s Cowboy Poetry CD of the Year award in 2012.
Knight says she draws inspiration from her own background, but sometimes uses works of cowboy art to give her ideas, or inform a certain emotion or atmospheric vibe in a poem.
“I can only write about what I already know,” she says when asked about what she brings to the genre as a woman. “But I can write about a man or frame a poem from a man’s perspective, although it will be fiction.”
Knight likes poems that tell stories. She is writing one now about an octogenarian cowboy friend of hers named Cliff.
Unlike Knight, Mehl is an example of someone who doesn’t have cowboy roots. He is a pediatrician by day. His practice is in Boulder County.
“Most of my peers in poetry bring horsemanship and real cowboy skills to their work,” Mehl says, although he notes that in a way his practice is the “human variety of animal husbandry.”
“I’m sort of ‘channeling’ a cowboy. They say that if you live the cowboy life long enough that one day you wake up and you’re a cowboy poet. I just hope it works in reverse.”
William Porter: 303-954-1877, wporter@denverpost.com or @williamporterdp
Colorado cowboy poetry gathering
What: 27th annual roundup of cowboy poets, singers and yodelers
When: Jan. 21-24
Where: Opening night sampler show at Miner’s Alley Playhouse, 1224 Washington Ave., Golden. All other performances at American Mountaineering Center, 710 10th St., Golden
Tickets ($20-$75, plus a $165 weekend pass) and performance schedule: 1-888-718-4253 or
