Newport’s Poet Lariat Is at Home on the Range

Frank Carpenter is about as quintessential Newport Beach as the city’s famed dory fishing fleet and the rows of yachts that line the harbor.

He was born of privilege--a state senator’s son--went to college at USC and now, at 31, is vice president of a small company. He lives with his wife and two children just a few miles from the posh Harbor View hills home where he was raised.

It’s just that Carpenter has one little habit that separates him from his neighbors. Poems. Cowboy poems. Rambling, rhyming verses about cross-breeding bison and crossing Caney Creek that few of his Newport neighbors would imagine sprouting from his ballpoint pen.

And every year about this time he sheds his weekend beachwear in favor of jeans, boots and couple-gallon hat, and heads northeast to the annual cowboy poetry convention in Elko, Nevada.

This year, he’s been invited there as a featured panelist poet, a post sought by 300 to 400 writing ranchers, and won by about three dozen applicants.

The 8th annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering, sponsored by the Salt Lake City-based Western Folklife Center, runs through Sunday in the small northern Nevada town, a few hundred miles east of Reno, where the 16,000 residents prepare each year for the growing onslaught of visitors.

Some 8,000 performers and patrons are expected to attend this year’s gathering, whose theme is a continuation of last year’s emphasis on the Latino influence in cowboy lore.

Says Carpenter: “It’s kind of a scary thing. To be like the neighborhood mime. I try not to make a big deal about it, so it’s not like the neighbors are saying, ‘Oh, there goes Mr. Rhymey.’ ”

Though Carpenter’s always written poetry, including two published floral-covered gift books about heartfelt feelings, how he became a cowboy poet harks back to a young man’s journey he made about 10 years ago to the family farm in Tailholt, Okla., a one-building town in the Ozarks.

While not the Kerouac-influenced across-the-country or around-the-world trip common at that age, Carpenter’s scaled-down version fueled his interest in the Old West.

Memories of working on the farm those few years in the early 1980s left him searching for a way to express that time of his life. But miles away from open space and fresh manure, he felt void of material to help tell his tale.

Then, a friend introduced him to the cowboy convention, and after one trip, he was hooked.

“I didn’t even know what it was. I just started writing,” says Carpenter, who shifts into a hearty drawl when he recites his Western works.

While his published gift books gave him a bigger and more formal audience than the family and friends he was used to composing for, the cowboys gave him what he says is an even greater gift--people who wanted to listen.

“Most people don’t want to hear about your creative outlet,” said Carpenter. “I don’t want to say I’ve been in the closet about my other poetry, but it’s nice to have something with such appeal--where people buy tickets to go in and hear it.”

At Elko, real cowboys who write while they ride, recite old favorites and exchange newly scribed masterpieces like nowhere else in the world. Women poets have carved a name for themselves giving the West a hearty feminist flair, and a new twist on a typically male-dominated piece of history.

What Carpenter’s poems lack in authentic rural ranch flavor they make up for in the crafty rhyme of someone who has written hundreds of hundreds of poems in the past few decades.

Many of his works return him to the Oklahoma days, such as this excerpt from “The Trail’s End:”

Like some I took to wandering

When greener pastures called

But I can’t shake the memory

Of the place where oaks stand tall

Where water flows from earth

and sky

And Johnson grasses grow

A paradise for man and beast

Oh, why’d I ever go

In Elko, where poets range from 6 to 75 years of age, Carpenter seems to fit in as one of the younger writers, someone who knows how to make snappy rhymes and brings a Southern California sincerity, says Hal Cannon, founder of the gathering and artistic director of the Western Folklife Center, where he has spent years chronicling cowboy poems.

Even though such well-known cowboys as Curley Fletcher and Bruce Kiskaddon have gone down in history as spokesmen for an entire genre of poetry from the turn-of-the-century West, hundreds of others have been lost.

Many cowboy poets of yesteryear were unable to put pen to paper to log their verse, and other preservation efforts have literally been lost in the wind when the dwindling breed of aging cowboys had fewer and fewer listeners to hear their tales.

Likewise, many current cowboy writers hesitate to type up their tales because they believe that their work has been scoffed by modern academics. They believe it has been criticized for its simple rhymes, bucolic storytelling and pastoral poetic style, and denied the attention often given works by more educated and noted authors.

On top of that, many cowboy poets believe that the only time their work is given greater exposure in the mainstream is when it’s featured as a cute byproduct of a bygone era or simply reduced to nostalgic and historic kitsch.

These are disturbing thoughts to most of the artists who attend the Elko gathering, about 90% of whom are working ranchers, Cannon adds.

“It really doesn’t fit in the art world,” he says. “The fact is (critics) always talk doggedly about it. . . . Art in the Western World is about going to college.”

But with a little encouragement, modern cowboys have been persuaded to document their verse and many are printed in little booklets put out in small quantities by independent publishers. Archives at the Folklife Center now have about 10,000 poems on file, many that were written down after years of surviving only through stories in oral tradition.

Cannon says he’s always surprised at the growing interest in the Elko event.

“The first time, we sort of held it in the middle of winter in the middle of nowhere. Cowboys told us they’d never stand up and recite their poetry, even though they’d been writing it for 100 years.”

But now he’s also convinced that with the growing dilemmas facing a dying breed--one of four cowboys has closed shop in the past decade--the yearly gatherings provide a forum and a comfort that even the crustiest of cowboy poets have grown to enjoy.

“It’s an important event for ranchers. There’s so much pressure these days, especially with the environmental movement, for open space and to get the cows off the ranges,” Cannon says. “These people are just holding on. And those who aren’t on the ranch anymore wish they were.”