Ropin’ & rhymin’
Cowboy poets to stoke the past at annual gathering

By Pam Mellskog
The Daily Times-Call

	Zeb Dennis feeds his horses at his Longmont pasture. Dennis, who calls himself a cowboy poet, realized his childhood dream in 1993 when he left his job at IBM for the ranch life. Times-Call/Kristin Goode

LONGMONT — Zeb Dennis’ favorite cartoon depicts a cowboy with a black eye, a slinged arm and a plaster casted leg. The caption reads: “I don’t eat beef ’cuz it tastes good. I eat it out of revenge.”

The Longmont ranch hand and farrier appreciates this cowboy’s salty side. Western life kicked him around Boulder County for 25 years, and he has jotted related rhymes down for the past 15.

Dennis, 57, calls himself a cowboy poet — a tough guy with a sensitive side.

This artistic niche stands out for that vinegar-and-water mix and for roping listeners back to the beaten path versus dragging them farther from it.

In mid January, he and 37 performers from 15 states will strut their silky spoken stuff during the 17th Annual Colorado Cowboy Poetry Gathering at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities.

“I’ll open by saying, ‘You know, folks, whether you’ve cowboyed or ridden a horse at all, you just sit back and relax like we were around a campfire,” Dennis said.

Nineteenth century buckaroos first spun their yarns around that circle of light and heat to entertain and often teach a lesson.

“They didn’t have television or iPod Shuffles to pass the time then,” he said.

The lifestyle’s harshest realities — say, throwing hay during subzero cold snaps to mercy killing sick or injured animals — typically feed the most romantic cowboy verse.

Breaking bucking horses factors into this folklore, too, Dennis said.

His poem, “The Handcock Mare,” describes a cowboy’s battle to ride a green 1,200-pound animal.

The words paint a picture of an airborne horse arching and twisting under the cowboy. But this rider stays aboard long enough to appreciate that spirit:

Man-o-man, that horse could buck. ... She proved me right, when she saved my life in the winter of ninety-three,

Busted five-foot drifts at twenty below, never seen such ability.

Than the Handcock mare

Well, she’s stabled up in horse heaven now right along god’s side,

Cause, whenever he needs a miracle there’s just one horse to ride.

and that’s the Handcock mare.

Dennis based the poem on Cash, the six-year-old mare he bought cheap for her wild streak.

Now, she pastures with his other two horses on acreage he owns on Longmont’s west side.

“And she’s not dead yet,” he said, laughing. “Cowboy poets can take poetic license. They can take an animal that is alive and make it dead.”

Berthoud cowboy poet Tim Nolting, 56, draws inspiration from his Kansas farm boy life from ages 10 to 15. That’s when his fall chores included herding cattle after school to harvested cornfields.

Because those fields had no fences, he had to sit on “Ace” — the horse he shared with his father — and make sure they stayed put until about 10 p.m., when he rounded them up for the gated pasture.

“When you’re that age out in the dark, if anyone says they’re not afraid, they’re lyin’,” Nolting, now a carpenter and handyman, said. “So you just make poems to make noise and keep your mind off it.”

He never wrote down those early poems — tales about coyotes howling in the distance, the stupid cow that wandered away, the stars and mushy ones for girlfriends.

But spending so many dark hours in the saddle beside the grazing beasts helps him write the kind of verse today that wins fans.

“There was a gentleman who walked up to me once (after a performance), and he was an old cowboy, probably in his 90s,” Nolting said. “And with tears in his eyes, he grabbed my hand and said, ‘Young feller, you can really tell it like it is.’”

Other cowboy poets tell it like it is without first-hand experience.

Boulder pediatrician Al Mehl called this the “inner cowboy.”

One of his poems, “The Great Depression,” pulls from his father’s recollections growing up on a Kansas farm during that era.

“He remembered people coming down the road with their children and a carpet bag asking for bread,” Mehl, 50, said. “They weren’t rich. But Dad just couldn’t imagine being so hungry to eat bread without jelly.”

Another poem, “I Ain’t No Cowboy,” taps into that “subliminal” cowboy:

“... I’m really not a cowboy, though I’d like to be, of course. I’ll never be a cowboy, prob’bly never own a horse.

... But I’m kinda like a cowboy, playin’ music by a fire.

I’m kinda like a cowboy, when I choose to be a liar.

And I’m kinda like a cowboy, when I’m late by half an hour.

I’m kinda like a cowboy, when I forgit to take a shower.

Shoot, I ain’t no cowboy, never gave that life a whirl.

But I’m kinda like a cowboy. (’Cause I never got that girl.)”

Still, by stretching his imagination, he hopes to stretch someone else’s to another place and time.

“You really have a sense when you hear cowboy poetry that you’re hearing a voice from a hundred years ago,” Mehl said.

If you go

What: The 17th Annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering

When: Thursday, Jan. 12 through Sunday, Jan. 15

Where: Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, 6901 Wadsworth Blvd., Arvada

Tickets: $12 to $26

More info: 720-898-7200; www.arvadacenter.org/cowboy

Pam Mellskog can be reached at 303-684-5224, or by e-mail at pmellskog@times-call.com.