What is Cowboy Poetry?

Cowboy poetry is rhymed, metered verse written by someone who has lived a significant portion of his or her life in Western North American cattle culture. The verse reflects an intimate knowledge of that way of life, and the community from which it maintains itself in tradition. Cowboy poetry may or may not in fact be anonymous in authorship but must have qualities, content, and style that permit it to be accepted into the repertoire of the cultural community as reflecting that community's aesthetics in style, form, and content. The structural style of cowboy poetry has its antecedents in the ballad style of England and the Appalachian South. It is similar to popular works of authors such as Robert W. Service and Rudyard Kipling.

  At least that appears to be the opinion of former Montana State Folklorist Mike Korn, who wrote those words as a working definition of cowboy poetry for the first Western Folklife Center National Poetry Gathering in 1985. In the twenty years since then, the question, "what is cowboy poetry?" has been the source of endless discussion, and even argument. Much of that discussion has been summarized at CowboyPoetry.com, on their What is Cowboy Poetry page. I recommend it to you as an interesting jumping off point in any investigation of the genre.