DRY CRIK Journal

COWBOYS & IMAGES. By William Matthews. Callaway Editions, 1994. 136 pages. $40

According to the editor’s introduction, William Matthews has only been painting cowboys since 1985. This seems amazing, although the timelessness of the settings he uses, and of the images that emerge from them, appear to exist somewhere outside any specific chronological pressure. Had watercolor been a medium of wider choice 100 years ago, these pictures could have possibly been rendered then.

But probably not. Matthews’s place in the pantheon of great Western American art owes a tremendous debt to his watercolor technique, even beyond his unquestioned technical mastery of papers and paint. It’s almost impossible to imagine an artist employing traditional oils, and being influenced in any capacity by academy notions of proper composition, actually choosing to allow so much open space around his subjects. Although Matthews’s work has been accepted as an authentic expression by a culture whose innate aesthetic conservatism goes without saying, his willingness to allow the very paper he paints upon to serve the function of the sweeping vistas of Western landscape is an innovation that has some important resonances with the wilder frontiers of modern conceptual artforms. His pictures look as though they could have been painted alongside Remington and Russell and Seltzer, but of course they weren’t, and could not have been – they are clearly contemporary works, and it’s just that enigma that makes them great.

In no way does this imply that Matthews is insensitive to the power of the actual landscape in cowboy life. This volume reproduces a number of his formal landscapes that are remarkable (viewed alongside the context of his intense studies of form, shape and movement in human figures) for their total absence of broadbrimmed bipeds ahorseback in the foreground. It’s a subtle, yet succinct example of why Matthews is unlikely to ever win a medal from the Cowboy Artists of America in the same career that finds him acclaimed the leading painter of cowboys by the cowboys themselves. For once, a western artist has managed to portray the effect of landscape on its supposed citizens without having to rope the two together every frame of the way. I expect most working cowboys see a lot of country free of cowboys standing in their line of vision all of the time, a phenomenon that rarely finds an appreciative vision in most of the Western art that sells in Santa Fe or Scottsdale. It certainly comes together between the covers of this collection.

COWBOYS & IMAGES features 104 color reproductions, a useful biographical introduction by Dyan Zaslowsky, and a clever bit of MC Ranch story recycling by William Kittredge.

Kittredge’s position as one of the finest composers of prose in the West, a prose that nevertheless reads with the verve of an oral spontaneity, probably owes more to his ranch background than he realizes, given his subsequent academic training. It’s odd to see his writing here, not from a careerist standpoint, but from the constant ambiguity of Kittredge’s attitude toward a culture he just as soon see vanish, albeit with the boss’s son’s prerogative of having the last word via his memoirs. Kittredge’s contradictions in this respect are truly epic, and perhaps through the obtaining of flashy clips like this his sensibility is slowly shifting to allow the possibility that ranch culture wasn’t necessarily finished circa WWII. For the most part, William Matthews’s portfolio is the antithesis of Kittredge’s career-long elegy for a lifestyle he just couldn’t cut as a hand on the range. As a hand on the page, he is tops – one wonders if writing like the piece included here is part of a very long gather at the farthest reaches of the field.

TULARE DUST: A Songwriter’s Tribute to Merle Haggard. Various Artists, Produced by Tom Russell and Dave Alvin (Hightone Records, 1994. 220 4th St. #101, Oakland, CA 94607). CD and cassette.

The so-called “tribute album” has become an increasingly visible product on recording shop racks. Few of them have enjoyed the visionary spirit of the pioneer of the form’s projects (I refer to producer Hal Willner, whose compilations honoring, for instance, Thelonious Monk, Kurt Weil and the music of the films of Walt Disney have resulted in one of the most idiosyncratic catalogs in modern sound anthology). Still, it’s hard to miss if a great subject is selected, and sometimes a masterpiece is possible with lesser-known material. Before I found a copy of TULARE DUST, my vote for the most successful (i.e., challenging but relistenable) tribute album after Willner’s collections was BEAT THE RETREAT, based on the songs of British folk-rock pioneer Richard Thompson.

TULARE DUST must not be confused with the album MAMA’S HUNGRY EYES, a parallel project that uses interpretations of Haggard’s songs by a herd of (mostly) new Nashville stars. With the exception of Willie and Emmylou (and, perhaps not so surprising given his pre-celebrity chops as an instrumentalist, Vince Gill), MAMA’S HUNGRY EYES demonstrates just how soul-deadening the production values of modern Nashville are. Haggard was recently quoted describing the new country music as “rock’n roll filtered through milktoast.” It’s hard for even his songs to survive such degradation, and that’s just what happens with the major label job.

Haggard remains one of the truly great writers in country music, possibly the greatest to have emerged West of Texas. It’s appropriate that the business of reclaiming the soul of his music in this decade should wind up on the frets of some of the best young songwriters to have evaded Nashville the past generation.

The clearest difference is the dramatically scaled-back production values of TULARE DUST. Keyboards are only used twice in 15 tracks (on MAMA’S HUNGRY EYES, only Vince Gill kept a piano out of the studio, and it helps), drums on only half of them. Most of the rest comprise ensembles of three or less players, including aching solo guitar contributions from Dwight Yoakum (the one really big name on the record) and Steve Young (whose version of “Shopping for Dresses” might be the stand-out tune of the entire sequence).

There are so many marvelous moments included here, the best advice is to just buy the album and discover them for oneself. My favorites have tended to shift around, which is probably the highest compliment one can give a project such as this. It has tremendous depth and balance, and the individual tracks have quite a magical tendency to enhance each other without detracting from the integrity of their own moment, which is some trick in this variety of endeavor.

I’m real fond of Joe Ely’s hard-driving take on “White Line Fever,” which I used to overlook in my previous fondness for Robert Earl Keen’s “Daddy Frank” which immediately precedes it. Tom Russell displays a killer roots-country vocal (for a New Yorker particularly) on the title track, and co-producer Dave Alvin closes the disc with a moving, spooky rendition of “Kern River.” Some of the most authentic sounding performances actually were recorded in Nashville, although Iris Dement, Lucinda Williams, and Billy Joe Shaver are generally renowned for their lack of interest in playing that Top-40 country style.

It’s enlightening to note how may of these performers have the L.A. punk rock scene in their backgrounds – Alvin, Peter Case and especially X’s John Doe. I almost wish Doe’s version of “Silver Wings” (from a long out-of-print side project from the early 80’s revealing the country influence in the roots rock mix) had been used instead of Marshall Crenshaw’s overdubbed take. The strangest cut here is Rosie Flores’s sugary sweet interpretation of “My Own Kind of Hat.” The boldest is Barrance Whitfield’s “Irma Jackson,” which very beautifully and very subtly restates the humanity of the original.

This is a great collection, and it’s a fine introduction to a number of writers whose work deserves far more attention than commercial networks allow.

BETWEEN EARTH & SKY: Poets of the Cowboy West. Edited by Anne Heath Widmark. Photographs by Kent Reeves (New York, Norton, 1995).

Norton & Co. is renowned in the publishing industry for its long delays in getting new titles into print. The unfortunate advance copy of this anthology sent to reviewers somewhat enforced the notion that it had, as Jack Aubrey would say, “missed its tide.” The critical omission from the bound galley’s was Kent Reeves’s photographs, leaving one to form an opinion based only on the text. In that state, the poetry read like yesterday’s papers, Anne Widmark’s biographical profiles seemed oddly suspended in space, and a truly mawkish Foreward jingle-jangled cowboy clichés with the vengeance of a Hallmark card.

Which is a roundabout way of noting I’m glad I didn’t review BETWEEN EARTH & SKY prior to experiencing the finished product, because its power is fully located in a vision that requires all three components – poetry, prose and photographs – to adequately express itself. The result is, by a long distance, the most personally in-depth, emotionally charged yet somehow objectively balanced appreciation of the “poetry of the cowboy West” yet gathered.

The 12 poets selected for inclusion tend to favor the more progressive trends in Cowboy Poetry – they certainly represent much of the cutting edge in terms of an active, working concern with poetics as a cultural vocation. Given the completed perspective of the book, an interesting sort in the material chosen to represent the actual literature has taken place, from the inescapable “Reincarnation” to a probable one-time rarity like “Song Notes for Ian Tyson.” Of the 11 writers associated with the movement as it has generated from Elko, the presence of Joel Nelson is particularly astute given his preference for promoting the classic repertoire in his public appearances. His own compositions, painstakingly grounded in traditional technique, rank near the top of contemporary balladstyle poetry, and deserve to be more widely circulated.

The 12th poet is Drummond Hadley, whose influence as a cowboy poet elder is long overdue (and despite numerous previous attempts to include his work in other anthologies). He is the most important and authentic cowboy culture poet with the least amount of recognition within the culture itself. Even blaming this on his legendary reticence as a writer (few poets in America in any genre have avoided promoting their work as thoroughly as Hadley, whose lack of regard for publishing, answering mail, hobnobbing, etc. is epic), one still feels the grave absence of a vital link in Western literature. Hadley is a living connection to the entire alternative canon of modern American poetry, and the relationship of that canon to the intuitive poetics of the rural West is quietly demonstrated throughout this volume.

He was present at the first Elko Gathering, but apparently felt his use of open forms precluded the audience’s attentions at that time, at least as defined by the academic disciplines that had organized the event. The terse, no nonsense anecdotal pieces Hadley performed a scant handful of times during that visit would continue to be in the vanguard of oral-tradition performance poetics at Elko even a decade later. So too would be his physical impulses, preferring to fire an actual blank on the nightshow stage, an astonishing visceral contrast to Baxter Black’s use of prerecorded gunshot effects some Gatherings later. The poems included here are closer to more lyrical rhythms of his previously published, long out-of-print 3 collections (the bibliography omits THE SPIRIT BY THE DEEP WELL TANK, Goliard, 1972), yet anyone willing to read their graceful long lines aloud will experience a striking reassessment of any previous assumption regarding the need for rhyme as the ultimate arbiter of the oral tradition.

Kent Reeves’s photographs employ rough angles and framings, occasionally off-center their subjects, improvise on available light and settings, and present settings that look like real dirt and sky (never postcards). Seldom has the relationship between poet and land been made so acutely clear via such artful indirection – the effect of the total portfolio of pictures (5 per poet, though concerned with working/living environment as much as formal portraiture) is a quite revolutionary advance in the pictorial representation of ranch culture. If the high-energy exuberance of Paul Zarzyski’s line could somehow be distilled into Vess Quinlan’s tacit images, the result might come out looking like these marvelous sepia toned fragments from a pastoral holograph.

Beyond even the technical beauty of the pictures, there exists an indefinable magic in the portraits. I know all of these poets, am friends with most of them and close to more than a few, and there are portraits here that taught me more about these people than I ever guessed I knew.

They’re expectedly what was required to put Anne Widmark’s succinct biographical essays over the top, given that the writing and the photographs were generated from the same visits to the poet’s home landscapes. She fills in and enlarges on the visual imagery while moving the focus of the project into other concerns not always addressed by anthologies (even while possibly assumed by them). The influence of other writers outside Cowboy poetry, odd bits of personal histories, the effect of the ongoing community on these poets with informal comments and her own observations, result in remarkably insightful assessments that read as all too short. The full impact of the project is revealed through these chapters as a personal odyssey inseparably hinged to the emergence of a new voice of the literary rural West, and it succeeds finally as an important and unique contribution to that voice, while setting a new standard for anyone wishing to present it in any future collection.

HONY-TONK CANTOS AND DRUNKARD’S DREAMS. By Kell Robertson. (PsychoTex books, P.O. Box 47071, Ft. Worth, TX 76147. 1994) 34 pp, $5 regular edition, $10 signed.

Kell Robertson’s career, and the actual body of writing that has emerged from it, generally offers one of the most troubling and enigmatic conundrums in contemporary Western American Literature. The impact of its puzzle on modern Cowboy poetry is even more astute.

He has been an intimate of western American small press from its inception. His first book, TOWARD COMMUNICATION, was issued by the seminal Grande Ronde Press in La Grande, OR in 1967. The nearly three decades since have produced about a dozen more collections, mostly small chapbooks and pamphlets in very small press runs, not impossible to find yet fairly scarce. Some of these reprint occasional poems from earlier volumes, while it’s not at all unusual to find lost or uncollected work by Robertson in various fugitive journals and long-extinct literary magazines of the era.

“Fugitive” is a fine word for describing Robertson’s position in current letters, serving both as an adjective and noun while having nothing to do with the conservative New Critics who originally applied the concept to their concerns in the 1930’s and 40’s. “Outlaw” might be another. Robertson was a C&W singing redneck in the very midst of the North Beach hippie scene in the 60s, a poet for whom Hank Williams and THE WILD BUNCH were as profound and important an influence as the poetry of Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Keith Wilson, during a time when none of the above were especially fashionable in the circles he was plowing through.

Robertson has indeed left powerful impressions on his various audiences and literate compadres, a remarkably high percentage of whom now refuse to let him near their homes. From one perspective, his restlessness, his itinerant troubadour’s journeying throughout this country and Mexico echoes the earlier example of Woody Guthrie. From another view, his obsession with paralleling and exploiting the great mythologies of the West has led him into a life of contrived squalor and caricatured tragedy. Never as primal in his intellectual engagements as his legend, with much encouragement on his own part, has often insisted, his self-edited, hand-crafted mimeo mag DESPERADO (nine issues from the late 1960s, with a fine tenth issue emerging in 1992) made a stunning, wholly intuitive and historical early case for the interrelationships between urban street and Western rural poetry. As Thomas McGuane once observed, however, there is a critical difference between being a desperado, and being truly desperate. Whatever real damage Robertson has done to himself in pursuing his muse, there remains an element of bravado in his writing that borders on posturing. What makes it so important and compelling is that no one has taken it quite so far as he has, in its specific guise of a rambling gunfighter with a guitar. The small but effective body of work he has left to mark his passage is fraught with lessons in the perils of image mongering.

At his absolute best (if you can find a copy, in BEAR CROSSING, Guerilla Poetics, 1990), Robertson establishes a vision of the West simultaneously imploding from the force of its own mythology while somehow surviving just beyond the ability of mankind’s power to control it. He has a deep sympathy for our degraded open lands, and the wildlife that is being destroyed as a side effect of development, of the new race to stake a claim in the Wild West. Such poems owe much of their force to Robertson’s quandary as a man himself consumed with that chase, however more “authentic” his own position is. It’s like a vast metaphor for the archetypal Last Hunter killing the Last Elk, destroying himself in the very process of being most true to the purest drives of his person.

This is the specific demon that Robertson appears to pursue and be pursued by. HONKY-TONK CANTOS AND DRUNKARD’S DREAMS is a less successful version of that dynamic, given the understandable tendency to perhaps romanticize the deromanticized situation of being down-and –out – which is how I would define “posturing” in this instance, although the line between actual and supposed circumstances, between, say, an alcoholic’s disease and the amount of self-knowledge he possesses in being possessed by it, is impossible to accurately define while remaining evident.

This is still a must-have volume, if no other reason than it’s the only readily available collection of Robertson’s poetry around right now. It also happens to be a physically beautiful tribute to the outlaw small press aspect of his career, reproducing the poems from original typed proofs, the various typewriters in various font sizes depending on the length of the piece. The poems themselves are closer to notebook fragments or meditations that they are to the fuller narratives that characterize Robertson’s most lasting work, but single lines and images continue to reverberate. The inscription Robertson put on my copy of BEAR CROSSING (the only time we’ve met, in Durango, 1992) could have appeared here somewhere. Since it doesn’t, I offer it as a previously unpublished example of the warring duality he tries to address more directly in this volume than anywhere else in his ouvre:

I will never know
what my heart is
but I can hear it
SING

And of course there are a few moments here where the collision of a specific time in space and a few overheard words put the scary West of our present and future into a moment no other American poet of his generation has managed with such a casual yet devastating command of vernacular irony (a poem of the same title in BEAR CROSSING being one of the most powerful pieces in a powerful book):

TAOS PLAZA

In the yellow information booth
with flowers painted on it
the lady with all the Navajo silver
and turquoise hanging around
her fat neck, tells the people
from New Jersey to pay no
attention to
panhandling Indians.

“You give them an inch
they’ll take a mile,”
she smiles.

She is a nice lady.
Her husband owns an art gallery
she says
they hang Navajos all the time.