From Cowboy to Classic: The Poetry of Longmire (Season 2, Episode 12)

We here at P&PC have long suspected that there's an undercover army of poets in Hollywood and that, cloaked in the Mackintosh of Nielson ratings and prime-time broadcast slots, they've been sneaking all sorts of poems into people's everyday lives via tv shows ranging from Gunsmoke to Breaking Bad. Well, now we've got some hard evidence to back it up: Season 2, Episode 12 of the I'll-cling-to-my-traditional-honorable-manhood-in-an-ever-changing-world-because-what-that-ever-changing-world-needs-more-than-ever-is-traditional-honorable-manhood Western cop show Longmire. If you're getting the impression that we don't totally love Longmire, well, you wouldn't be entirely wrong. We're through the end of Season 2, and we're tired of the old-man-driven plot generally speaking. We don't like the show's treatment of the Cheyenne Indians all that much. And, truth be told, we wish the show were told from the point of view of deputy Vic or Henry Standing Bear and not Sheriff Walt Longmire. But whatever, right? We've watched it this far and, as the following's gonna explain, there's no way we're gonna stop now.

First aired August 19, 2013, Season 2, Episide 12 telegraphs its literary ambitions via the allusion to Flannery O'Connor in its title ("A Good Death Is Hard to Find") and is then very neatly bookended by two poems, one a cowboy poem, and one a classic. And wouldn't you know it? It was written by real-life poet Tony Tost, author of the poetry collections Complex Sleep and Invisible Bride. Tost (pictured in the ball cap here) is a regular writer for Longmire and first caught our eye with his allusion to Emily Dickinson in the title of Season 2, Episode 6 ("Tell It Slant"), which he also wrote. So, to a certain extent we could tell that the poetry of "A Good Death Is Hard to Find" was coming, and we've been keeping a lookout for it ever since. And now that we've found it, we're looking for more. Indeed, given both Tost's inclination to the poetic and Longmire's first name (Walt), we're fully expecting to get a Whitman reference somewhere on down the line, which would be, like, totally awesome, as it would allow us to tie Longmire to Breaking Bad and Mad Men in a series of three contemporary shows—indubitably a pattern!—all using variously brooding Whitmans to process their threatened masculinity.

"A Good Death Is Hard to Find" opens with what a banner hanging in the back- ground calls the "Absaroka County Cowboy Poetry Slam" taking place at Henry's bar, the Red Pony Saloon ("and continual soiree"), which you can watch in the first clip below. The poem is by the town's sorta corrupt retired former sheriff, and some humorous scenes throughout the episode show him composing or practicing his poetry. And the episode closes—the second clip below—with a scene in which Longmire quotes the Iliad in a downright poetic "get-out-of-town-before-sunrise" ultimatum he gives to Vic's stalker. So, the episode gives us two sheriffs, both with poems in their mouths: one a writer, one a reader; one sorta corrupt, the other of impeccable honor; one trading in popular poetry, one trotting out the classics. We don't really like how the popular-poetry math works out in this regard, but we'll nevertheless raise our glass—a toast for Tost!—and hope that Tony gives us that Whitman reference we're looking for to help make up for it.

Potato Farmer Poetry

On the Poetry Beat in Salem Oregon

Friday, January 21 sees not one, but two poetry events taking place in Salem, Oregon, and the P&PC staff is hoping to make it to both. Consider:

1. The SAIF Corporation Agri-Business Banquet

With a long list of sponsors, this year's "celebration of Willamette Valley agriculture" is featuring renowned mustachioed cowboy poet and humorist Baxter Black as the evening's entertainment. With his ten gallon hat, huge ol' belt buckle, and spirit channeling Canadian balladeer Robert Service, Black has been described by the New York Times as "probably the nation's most successful living poet," appears on NPR, and lives—where else?—"between the horse and the cow—where the action is." No slouch when it comes to touring, the Brooklyn-born, former large animal veterinarian is set up for five January events alone which take him to Ohio, Montana, Arizona and Florida before he hits Oregon. You can check out some of his poems here, here, and here.

2. Willamette University MLK Celebration featuring Angela Davis & Good Sista/Bad Sista

The same night that Baxter Black brings his stylized spurs to the sold-out Salem Conference Center event, renowned civil rights leader and activist Angela Davis will be speaking on the campus of Willamette University as part of the school's two week-long MLK Day celebration. As cool as this is, what's landing her event on P&PC's calendar is actually the opening act that Willamette has lined up for Davis—the Portland-based spoken word duo of Turiya Autry and Walidah Imarisha known as Good Sista/Bad Sista. Check out an interview with them here and watch them perform here:



As far as P&PC can determine, tickets to the Agri-Business Banquet are sold out (they were $40 per person or $400 for a table of 10), but there are still seats left for the Davis & Good Sista/Bad Sista event. They're $15 each, with proceeds going to benefit the World Beat Festival and Oregon African American Museum.

Write 'em Cowboy: Lovin' the Lariat Laureates

You may have missed it—maybe you were distracted by the fuss that the Academy of American Poets kicks up about National Poetry Month out on the east coast each year—but April 19-25 was Cowboy Poetry Week to folks out West. It has been since April 11, 2003, in fact, when the U.S. Senate, led by a bipartisan group of Senators from Kansas, Montana, Nevada and Utah, unanimously passed a resolution recognizing "National Cowboy Week." Conrad Burns, a Montana Republican and one of the resolution's sponsors, explained, "Many think cowboys are a thing of the past, but I can tell you otherwise. In many western states like Montana, cowboys gather around a campfire and swap stories just as frequently as they did one hundred years ago. This oral tradition is now captured in written form as well, and several websites are dedicated solely to preserving and disseminating cowboy poetry and its history. My resolution will recognize the contribution of cowboy poetry to our history of the West, but also to mark it as a thriving tradition that continues even today."

Senator Burns is not just, uh, horsing around here, though that doesn't mean one can't wonder at the same time how much his soaring rhetoric calibrates with everyday life. Y'all might ask, for example, exactly how "thriving" is the thriving tradition of cowboy poetry that Burns extols and how, precisely, has this poetry really shaped the history of the West? Or, alternately, ya might query whether today's cowpokes really gather round campfires as often as they did a century ago—or whether they actually turn, instead, to their PC's and PowerMacs to make the range a little more like home? How, in other words, has trading in barbed wire for FireWire changed the way people out west rustle up their verse?

But one thing Senator Burns is not is wrong: cowboy poetry is alive—not just at highly-staged festivals, in the U.S. Senate chambers, or around century-old campfires burning a mixture of nostalgia and anachronism. Take, for example, the Rosebud-Treasure County Brand Book (pictured to the left), a spiral-bound book published in 1983 that records the various marks and brands of livestock owners from two adjacent counties in Burns's home state of Montana. The publication is not strictly a reference book, though. More like one of the farmer's almanacs from the 18th or 19th centuries which combined calendars with facts, figures, tasty morsels of historical advice, and—of course—lots of poetry, this Brand Book mixes together verse, anecdotes, jokes, stories, and even a glossary defining once-colloquial terms such as "dally," "kack," "slick fork," and "town hole." In other words, the Rosebud-Treasure County Brand Book is not just a handy-dandy reference guide designed to identify, record, and sort out the American West's ideogrammatic language of private property ownership, but it's also a sourcebook containing the markings—linguistic and otherwise—of a region's cultural property as well.

And crucial to this cultural property is poetry, and specifically (at least for folks in Rosebud and Treasure counties) the verse of Bob Fletcher, which the Brand Book features at length (pictured to the left). Poems like "The Trail of an Old Timer's Memory" and "The Big Sissies" are funny, self-conscious takes on what the east oftentimes assumes is an unquestioned desire on the part of westerners to get back to the good old days when men were men, women were women, and governments were smaller than they are now. In fact, however, "The Big Sissies" makes fun of this regressive 'tude by hilariously voicing an old-timer's scorn for "this new culture stuff" which includes airplanes, autos, records, radio, and even modern, uh, facilities that have "softened the old human herd." "Now, pardner," the poem's speaker explains:

...these toilets, for instance,
They fix 'em in all sorts of shape
With colored glazed tile
And puttin' on style
With rolls of this yere fancy crepe.

Why I've seen the day not so distant
When you welcomed a hole in the ground
With just a peeled rail
Supportin' your tail
And a catalog lyin' around.

Or I can go back a step further
Ere even the old rail was there,
When you'd squat on the hoof
With the sky for a roof
And then reach for a prickly pear.

Poetry & Popular Culture can't say for sure whether Senator Burns would cite "The Big Sissies" as evidence that cowboy poetry is thriving, but he could do worse, we think, than rope this one into the conversation. Whether and how it, and other poetry like it, contributes to the history of the west and the maintenance of a system of property that isn't just private is another question—and one, say we, that is definitely worth askin'. Like, totally, dude.