"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Tuesday, August 2, 2011

S. Omar Barker - Horses Versus Hosses




Horses Versus Hosses

by S. Omar Barker, from Songs of the Saddlemen


I heard an oldtime cowboy swappin' off some drawlin' talk
About them nags men used to ride, who didn't like to walk.
He spoke of them as hosses, so I up and asked him way
He didn't call them horses. Well, a gleam come in his eye,
And here is what he told me—be it right or be it wrong—
Some salty information that I'd like to pass along:

"You go out to the race track or some modern ridin' school,
And what you'll find 'em ridin' there is horses, as a rule.
You'll see 'em wrapped in blankets when they raise a little sweat,
And bedded in warm stables so they won't git cold or wet.

Their saddle is a postage stamp; they're combed and curried slick:
Their riders bobble up an' down like monkeys on a stick.
Them purty tricks are horses, son, but that there ain't the word
We used to call them shaggies that we rode behind the herd.

They might not be so purty, but they stayed outdoors at night.
They maybe weighed 900 pounds—all guts an' dynamite.
They took you where you had to go an' always brought you back,
Without no fancy rations that you purchase in a sack.

They loped all day on nothin' but your two hands full of grass.
On a Stetson full of water they could climb a mountain pass.
They swum you through the rivers an' they plowed you through the sand—
You an' your heavy saddle, an' they learned to understand.

Which end of the cows the tail was on, till all you had to do
Was set up in the saddle while they did the cow work, too!
Sometimes they sorter dodged your rope, sometimes they bucked you high,
But they was sure the apple of the oldtime cowhands eye!

These stable-pampered critters may be horses sure enough,
But them ol' cow range hosses, they was born to take it rough.
So that's the way they took it, till they earned a tougher name
Than these here handfed horses, all so delicate an' tame.

So, you can have your horses, with their hifalutin' gloss—
I'll take four legged rawhide—or in other words, a hoss!"






S. Omar Barker - He'll Do!




He'll Do!
by S. Omar Barker, 1928


Don't call me no star in the bronc bustin' game—
Sech words is plumb natcherly wrong.
Us cowboys jest say, when a feller is game:
"He'll do, boys, fer takin' along!"

Don't call me no "prince of good fellers" nor say
I'm 'bold, brave an' fearless" nor such!
Don't claim I'm no "marvel"—no fine "sobrikay"
Like "world-beatin' champeen"! Not much!

Fer I never hanker fer high-soundin' praise
A cowboy can't half understand.
I'd ruther be told, in the old puncher phrase:
"Say cowboy, yuh'll shore make a hand!"

Big words never warm up no cowpuncher's heart
In praise of him doin' his best
Like them simple phrases. A man does his part -
"He'll do, boys!" they say in the West.








Cowboy Poetry in Elko, Nevada




Poem On The Range

Cowboy Poets Gather In Nevada To Paint The West With Words,
Happy To Tell Of Life In The Saddle At The Drop Of A Stetson


Universal Press Syndicate
March 20, 1994


Just after sunrise on the Big Springs Ranch in northeastern Nevada, saddle leather creaked, spurs jingled, coyotes yipped. The sounds of the West. Then one more sound of the West was heard - a cowboy reciting poetry:

"There ain't no squall the banshee makes will make your neck hair rise,
Like that there bovine blood call as it echoes to the skies . . ."

The cowboy was Larry Schutte; the poetry was "Cowpen Moo-sic," a Western classic written by S. Omar Barker.

Schutte, 39, wore fringed chaps, a black cowboy hat and a blue neckerchief as he moved cattle in a pasture of rye. He, his horse and his dog worked in unspoken synchronization. As the herd moved, it seemed to generate its own weather system, raising a cloud of dust and the rumble of thunder.

Schutte tends to 1,000 head of cattle. He also tends to two children, makes horsehair ropes by hand and is a poet, singer, and musician in his own right. All that left him with little time to get into the town of Elko, Nevada, just 75 miles away, where more - much more - poetry was being recited.

For five days in January the rhyme was the reason as more than 40 cowboys recited and more than 8,000 fans listened during Elko's 10th annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

The term "cowboy poet" might conjure up a conflicting image: the strong, silent type and the sensitive, expressive type - an unlikely cross-breed of John Wayne and John Keats. But, indeed, most poets at Elko were, like Schutte, working cowboys.

They were genuine crack-of-dawnin', cigarette-rollin', dust-eatin', manure-troddin', sweatband-stainin', finger-freezin' wranglers who rope and ride, even if the hoofbeats of the cattle drives have been replaced by the whine of 18-wheelers hauling herds on asphalt "trails."

...And they recite at the drop of a Stetson.

At Elko they versified about bravery and tragedy, about uncanny cowhands, recalcitrant mules and "wrecks" (accidents on horseback). Their poems about practical jokes and tall tales evoked laughter from the audience; their poems about having to shoot a faithful horse brought tears.

Elko's Cowboy Poetry Gathering, held in winter when ranch duties slacken, is the oldest and biggest of its kind. But more than 150 other such gatherings are held throughout the year. Some include barbecues, others offer rodeos and collectible shows, still others conduct workshops where people can learn how to braid rawhide, engrave silver or prepare roundup recipes for hungry hands.

Elko featured all that and more, including scholarly panel discussions on ranching issues and a "Gathering of Gear" exhibit and auction that displayed the bridles and bits, quirts (short braided whips), bosals (bitless nose bands) and mecates (horsehair ropes) that are essential to a cowboy's day at the office.

And like most cowboy poetry gatherings it was family-oriented, with PG-rated language and special activities for children such as a puppet show, a poetry session for cowboys under 18, and a mechanical steer that young wranglers could try their hand at lassoing.




A Western Woodstock

But whatever its program, a cowboy poetry gathering is a kind of Western Woodstock, a celebration of Western culture and the words and music that express it. Each gathering presents a picture of the West as cowboy poets paint with words just as deftly as the classic Western artist Frederic Remington did with colors.

Their oral landscape reminds listeners that although prosaically the West is where hamburgers come from, more romantically the West is where America's original heroes - cowboys - come from.

These cowboys ride across a West that is as varied as it is vast, a West where ranches with names like the Pitchfork, the Four Sixes and the Circle-R hunker in mountain valleys or sprawl over plains near small towns with names like Hereford, High River and Recluse.

It is a West where for every city the size of Los Angeles, Calif., there are a thousand the size of Los Angeles, Texas (population 150). In fact, the combined population of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah is less than that of New York City.

Elko is typical of the Western small town - its main drag, Idaho Street, serves as a linear cornucopia of souvenir shops, boot shops, tack stores, steak restaurants, motels, mini-malls, and, this being Nevada, wedding chapels and casinos.

Demographically, Elko is a town of 27,000, a number swelled by a boom in gold mining in the area. And being rated No. 1 in the book "The 100 Best Small Towns in America" in 1993 didn't hurt, either.
Geographically, Elko is a notch on Interstate 80, which stretches like a belt 2,900 miles from New Jersey to San Francisco. During the poetry gathering, travelers came from both ends to learn about real cowboys.

One traveler, Randy Hale of New York City, learned that "the biggest problem to them is losing their ranches. The biggest problems from a New York point of view are drugs and guns and kids dropping out of school. . . . Their way of life here is completely different from mine. And some of these people are darned good poets."

Those darned good poets spent most of their time in Elko at the Convention Center. Featured poets recited in the auditorium, sitting on the stage in a row like birds on a wire. Other poets recited in three meeting halls during sessions that were open to anyone.

Some were relaxed veterans; some were nervous newcomers, standing banjo-eyed behind the podium and gripping the microphone tightly like a saddle horn. Poems ranged from classics to original works. Some were polished, some were ragged, all were sincere.

There were no winners or losers. Elko was just a forum for self-expression. If a cowboy forgot the words of a well-known classic he was reciting, a sympathetic voice in the audience likely would prime his poetic pump by calling out the next line.



Cowgirl Poets

Elko was a forum for cowgirl poets, too. Western writer and editor Teresa Jordan said, "Ranch women's writing has exploded in the last four or five years."

One cowgirl poet, Georgie Sicking of Nevada, has been a rancher most of her life (when she was 19, she was late to her wedding because she was roping wild burros). She is 72 now, and time, like prairie rain, has washed soft ravines in her face. Back when she decided to become a cowgirl, she was discouraged by less-liberated women. She wrote of those days:

"When I was young and foolish, the women said to me,
Take off those spurs and comb your hair if a lady you would be.
Take off that Levi jumper, put up those batwing chaps,
Put on a little makeup and we can get a date for you, perhaps' ...."

But she stayed in the saddle and eventually got her own ranch. "I do all the work myself except for plowing and haying. And neighbors help me with the branding."

Amid all the poetry, occasionally was heard a discouraging word. Cowboys, ever at the mercy of the elements, lately feel buffeted by winds from Washington, D.C. Much of the land in the West is public, its use regulated by the federal Bureau of Land Management under Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Many ranchers graze their cattle on more public than private land. They pay a grazing fee, but fear fee increases and worry about land-use restrictions that result from recreational and ecological considerations.

These changes leach out into the poetry. Baxter Black of Colorado wrote:

"If you've been losing sleep at night about the public land,
Yer not alone. We're all concerned with changes wrought by man.
. . . A wall! We need a giant wall to hold the riffraff back,
But since they own the public lands, we'll prob'ly catch some flak."

And there's one more change wrought by man. The growing interest in cowboy poetry has elevated it to the status of a business. At gatherings such as Elko's, dozens of books and tapes of poetry are sold. A few poets even make a living at it.

Waddie Mitchell of Nevada, for example, has recited on "The Tonight Show" and makes about 120 public appearances a year. He hopes to earn enough money to buy a ranch so that he can return to "buckarooing.

Cowboy poetry has even evolved to the point that these sagebrush literati sit in two camps: traditional and free verse. Hal Cannon, a founder of the Elko gathering, said of traditional verse, "You can trace cowboy poetry pretty directly back to England, to the old ballad form of poetry."

Traditional cowboy poetry is easily understood. It rhymes. It often has a four-beat cadence, like the gait of a horse.

Nevada cowboy Rod McQueary writes some free verse. When he recites, his words are spaced as regularly as fence posts:

"When they ask of Life, what will I say?
Can I describe time that swirls,
With fickle castanets,
And disappears?
A shrinking, self-swallowing serpent? ..."

But whether the form is traditional or free verse, a cowboy cannot live by poetry alone. He must have music. So at night in Elko, after the day's poetry sessions had ended, more sounds of the West were heard.

A few blocks down Idaho Street from the Convention Center, at the Stockmen's Motel, cowboys and cowgirls gathered in a meeting hall to listen to jam sessions as pickers and singers sat in circles with guitar, fiddle and mouth harp. They played "Git Along, Little Dogies," "Red River Valley" and "The Streets of Laredo." There were waltzes, ballads and square dance tunes.

By 3 a.m., cowboys and cowgirls began to leave the Stockmen's in twos and threes and fours. On Idaho Street a few cars and pickups cruised. A horn honked. From within one car the bass of the stereo thumped like a heart.

And then amid these city sounds came once again the sound of the West: A cowboy meandered through the Stockmen's parking lot repeating aloud lines recited earlier in the night by poet Buck Ramsey:

"I'll live in time with horse hoof falling;
I'll listen well and hear the calling,
The earth, my mother, bids to me,
Though I will still ride wild and free . . ."



More Information

Copyright (c) 1994 Seattle Times Company, All Rights Reserved.





Dylan Thomas - All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave





Coldplay - O (Fly On) - Extended
February 1, 2016



All That I Owe The Fellows Of The Grave
by Dylan Thomas


All that I owe the fellows of the grave
And all the dead bequeathed from pale estates
Lies in the fortuned bone, the flask of blood,
Like senna stirs along the ravaged roots.
O all I owe is all the flesh inherits,
My fathers' loves that pull upon my nerves,
My sisters tears that sing upon my head
My brothers' blood that salts my open wounds

Heir to the scalding veins that hold love's drop,
My fallen filled, that had the hint of death,
Heir to the telling senses that alone
Acquaint the flesh with a remembered itch,
I round this heritage as rounds the sun
His winy sky, and , as the candles moon,
Cast light upon my weather. I am heir
To women who have twisted their last smile,
To children who were suckled on a plague,
To young adorers dying on a kiss.
All such disease I doctor in my blood,
And all such love's a shrub sown in the breath.

Then look, my eyes, upon this bonehead fortune
And browse upon the postures of the dead;
All night and day I eye the ragged globe
Through periscopes rightsighted from the grave;
All night and day I wander in these same
Wax clothes that wax upon the ageing ribs;
All night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.
Then look, my heart, upon the scarlet trove,
And look, my grain, upon the falling wheat;
All night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.



Dylan Thomas
http://www.dylanthomas.com/








Biography

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his sonorous voice with a subtle Welsh lilt became almost as famous as his works. His best-known works include the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night". Appreciative critics have also noted the craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my Craft or Sullen Art", and the rhapsodic lyricism in "And death shall have no dominion" and "Fern Hill".


Early Life

Dylan Thomas was born in the Uplands area of Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales, on 27 October 1914 just a few months after the Thomas family had bought the house. Uplands was, and still is, one of the more affluent areas of the city.

His father, David John ('DJ') Thomas (1876–1952), had attained a first-class honours degree in English at University College, Aberystwyth, and was dissatisfied with his position at the local grammar school as an English master who taught English literature. His mother, Florence Hannah Thomas (née Williams) (1882–1958), was a seamstress born in Swansea. Nancy, Thomas's sister, (Nancy Marles 1906–1953) was nine years older than he. Their father brought up both children to speak only English, even though he and his wife were both bilingual in English and Welsh. 'DJ' was even known to give Welsh lessons at home.

Dylan is pronounced 'd?lan in Welsh, and in the early part of his career some announcers introduced him using this pronunciation. However, Thomas himself favoured the anglicised pronunciation /'d?l?n/. A review of a biography by Andrew Lycett (2004) notes: "Florence, the boy’s mother, had her doubts about the odd name: the correct Welsh pronunciation, which the family used, is “Dullan,” and she worried that other children would tease him by calling him “dull one.” Later, when broadcasting on the Welsh service of the BBC, Dylan Thomas had to instruct the announcers to say "'Dillan,' the way he himself pronounced it". His middle name, Marlais, was given to him in honour of his great-uncle, Unitarian minister William Thomas, whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles.

His childhood was spent largely in Swansea, with regular summer trips to visit his maternal aunts' Carmarthenshire farms. These rural sojourns and the contrast with the town life of Swansea provided inspiration for much of his work, notably many short stories, radio essays, and the poem Fern Hill. Thomas was known to be a sickly child who suffered from bronchitis and asthma. He shied away from school and preferred reading on his own. He was considered too frail to fight in World War II, instead serving the war effort by writing scripts for the government. Thomas's formal education began at Mrs. Hole's Dame school, a private school which was situated a few streets away on Mirador Crescent. He described his experience there in Quite Early One Morning:

Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and smelling of galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime — the pulling of a girl's hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature.

In October 1925, Thomas attended the single-sex Swansea Grammar School, in the Mount Pleasant district of the city, where his father taught. He was an undistinguished student. Thomas's first poem was published in the school's magazine. He later became its editor. He began keeping poetry notebooks and amassed 200 poems in four such journals between 1930 and 1934. He left school at 16 to become a reporter for the local newspaper, the South Wales Daily Post, only to leave the job under pressure 18 months later in 1932. After leaving the job he filled his notebooks even faster. Of the 90 poems he published, half were written during these first years. He then joined an amateur dramatic group in Mumbles called Little Theatre (Now Known as Swansea Little Theatre), but still continued to work as a freelance journalist for a few more years.

Thomas spent his time visiting the cinema in the Uplands, walking along Swansea Bay, visiting a theatre where he used to perform, and frequenting Swansea's pubs. He especially patronised those in the Mumbles area such the Antelope Hotel and the Mermaid Hotel. A short walk from the local newspaper where he worked was the Kardomah Café in Castle Street, central Swansea. At the café he met with various artist contemporaries, such as his good friend the poet Vernon Watkins. These writers, musicians and artists became known as 'The Kardomah Gang'. In 1932, Thomas embarked on what would be one of his various visits to London.

In February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the German Luftwaffe in a "three nights' blitz". Castle Street was just one of the many streets in Swansea that suffered badly; the rows of shops, including the 'Kardomah Café', were destroyed. Thomas later wrote about this in his radio play Return Journey Home, in which he describes the café as being "razed to the snow". Return Journey Home was first broadcast on 15 June 1947, having been written soon after the bombing raids. Thomas walked through the bombed-out shell of the town centre with his friend Bert Trick. Upset at the sight, he concluded: "Our Swansea is dead". The Kardomah Café later reopened on Portland Street, not far from the original location.


This text is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License


Dylan Thomas - All All and All






Coldplay - Gravity (Video HD)
May 13, 2017



All All and All
by Dylan Thomas
I

All all and all the dry worlds lever,
Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
All from the oil, the pound of lava.
City of spring, the governed flower,
Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
Towns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.
All all and all, the corpse's lover,
Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,
All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.


II

Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.

Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,
Know now the flesh's lock and vice,
And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.
Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,
Fear not the screws that turn the voice,
And the face to the driven lover.


III

All all and all the dry worlds couple,
Ghost with her ghost, contagious man
With the womb of his shapeless people.
All that shapes from the caul and suckle,
Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,
Square in these worlds the mortal circle.

Flower, flower the people's fusion,
O light in zenith, the coupled bud,
And the flame in the flesh's vision.
Out of the sea, the drive of oil,
Socket and grave, the brassy blood,
Flower, flower, all all and all.


Dylan Thomas
http://www.dylanthomas.com/



Dylan Thomas' poetry hut


Dylan Thomas
1914–1953



Dylan Marlais Thomas was born on October 27, 1914, in Swansea, South Wales. His father was an English Literature professor at the local grammar school and would often recite Shakespeare, fortifying Thomas's love for the rhythmic ballads of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Edgar Allan Poe

Thomas dropped out of school at sixteen to become a junior reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. By December of 1932, he left his job at the Post and decided to concentrate on his poetry full-time. It was during this time, in his late teens, that Thomas wrote more than half of his collected poems.

In 1934, when Thomas was twenty, he moved to London, won the Poet's Corner book prize, and published his first book, 18 Poems (The Fortune press), to great acclaim. The book drew from a collection of poetry notebooks that Thomas had written years earlier, as would many of his most popular books. 

Unlike his contemporaries, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, Thomas was not concerned with exhibiting themes of social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, had more in common with the Romantic tradition.

Thomas describes his technique in a letter: "I make one image—though 'make' is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict."

Two years after the publication of 18 Poems, Thomas met the dancer Caitlin Macnamara at a pub in London. At the time, she was the mistress of painter Augustus John. Macnamara and Thomas engaged in an affair and married in 1937. 

About Thomas's work, Michael Schmidt writes: "There is a kind of authority to the word magic of the early poems; in the famous and popular later poems, the magic is all show. If they have a secret it is the one we all share, partly erotic, partly elegiac. The later poems arise out of personality."

In 1940, Thomas and his wife moved to London. He had served as an anti-aircraft gunner but was rejected for more active combat due to illness. To avoid the air raids, the couple left London in 1944. They eventually settled at Laugharne, in the Boat House where Thomas would write many of his later poems.

Thomas recorded radio shows and worked as a scriptwriter for the BBC. Between 1945 and 1949, he wrote, narrated, or assisted with over a hundred radio broadcasts. In one show, "Quite Early One Morning," he experimented with the characters and ideas that would later appear in his poetic radio play Under Milk Wood (1953).

In 1947 Thomas was awarded a Traveling Scholarship from the Society of Authors. He took his family to Italy, and while in Florence, he wrote In Country Sleep, And Other Poems (Dent, 1952), which includes his most famous poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night." When they returned to Oxfordshire, Thomas began work on three film scripts for Gainsborough Films. The company soon went bankrupt, but Thomas's scripts, "Me and My Bike," "Rebecca's Daughters," and "The Beach at Falesa," were made into films. They were later collected in Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts (JM Dent & Sons, 1995).

In January 1950, at the age of thirty-five, Thomas visited America for the first time. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as a new medium for the art, are famous and notorious. Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination—he was theatrical, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling.

Thomas toured America four times, with his last public engagement taking place at the City College of New York. A few days later, he collapsed in the Chelsea Hotel after a long drinking bout at the White Horse Tavern. On November 9, 1953, he died at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City at the age of thirty-nine. He had become a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. He was buried in Laugharne, and almost thirty years later, a plaque to Dylan was unveiled in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. 


Dylan Thomas at work