Thursday, January 23, 2014

ALMOST COWBOY: MY JOURNEY INTO POETRY

I wrote my first poem in the fifth grade as part of a homework assignment, and my teacher entered it in a contest . . . and it won.  I was mortified.  Winning meant I had to get up in front of the entire school and receive it, and I sure didn't want that.  We're talking late forties here, mill village setting, and at a time when boys who wrote poetry were considered sissies.  I endured the humiliation but didn't write another poem until after I was past fifty years of age.

My second try at it was more enjoyable, and for a period of time (about ten years), I wrote a lot of poetry.  I studied it, practiced it, and got fairly good at it.  I went around to cowboy poetry gatherings and recited poetry, and I even went into a partnership with a friend to create a traveling road show of cowboy poets and singers.  That all ended when my partner died back in the late nineties, and I never performed again.  I didn't stop writing poetry altogether, but I slowed down a lot and turned my attention to prose writing.  And then lately I get this bright idea about publishing my poetry.  Yeah, real bright 'cause books of poetry are hard to sell.  But what the hell!  It's not like I'm selling a lot of anything, so I'm putting together a book called Almost Cowboy: My Journey Into Poetry.

Cowboy poetry, if you're not informed about it, is similar to the poetry of Robert Service.  It's standard meter and rhyme poetry, and usually isn't experimental in any way.  I broke that mold a long time ago, so my poetry doesn't qualify for standard cowboy poetry.  In fact, it might not qualify for being standard in regard to any genre of poetry.  You could stick a name tag on it, I suppose, but that's inconsequential to me.  It's almost cowboy, so that's what I call it.  Some of it is free verse, some is a mixture of free verse and rhymed, and some is experimental.  It is not intended for any particular audience, and there's no particular theme involved.  It's just a collection of poems I've written, along with some short prose and descriptions of how my journey took place.  Is it interesting?  Heck, I don't know.  Readers are always the judge of things like that.  Look me up under
Philip Martin Cawlfield or Cletus Duhon, the pen names I usually write under.  The new book will be
out in less than a month.

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