Columnist Jack Sheehan: If it rhymes, is it a poem?

Tuesday, Dec. 2, 1997 | 5:22 a.m.

A FEW YEARS AGO I WAS OFFERED the opportunity to write a book about a couple of rodeo cowboys traveling the circuit. It was to be a slice-of-life about the bumps and bruises of the rodeo life and the hardships and joys experienced by men in pursuit of rodeo stardom.

I was interested in the project until I learned that I would be expected to follow the cowboys from town to town, recording their misadventures, but without the cushion of an expense account. In other words, I would be expected to do all the work on my own nickel in hopes that the book made money. The offer was sort of like rodeo itself, in that nothing was guaranteed except the joy of the experience. I took a pass, but I did so with a certain amount of regret, because the cowboys I've known in my life have been a colorful and delightful lot, and the experience would have provided a peek at a world I've always been curious about. I mean, what little kid who grows up in the western United States doesn't at some point dream of becoming a cowboy?

One rodeo veteran with whom I've become friends is Kenny Coll, a former world champion who traveled the circuit for nearly 20 years. Whenever I see Kenny, he has a wild story about one of his calf-ropin' buddies from his circuit days. A particularly memorable one concerned a former top cowboy who celebrated after every rodeo by drinking profusely, partly as a way of making the pain go away. Then he would get in his pink Cadillac and drive to the next rodeo stop like a moonshiner in the back hills of Tennessee. Any hitchhikers he encountered along the way were in for rough treatment, because he had a devilish habit of veering his car at them as though to hit them, and when they dove out of the way, he would run over their luggage or backpacks. Now even though this was a horribly inconsiderate thing to do, the cowboy never seemed to express regret at his transgression, even after he sobered up.

He took such delight in this malfeasance that the other cowboys felt it was time for a payback. So they hired two mangy looking fellows to station themselves on the side of the highway out of town the morning after a rodeo had wrapped. The fellows packed a steamer trunk with concrete, and as the Cadillac approached, they stuck out their thumbs for a ride. As always, the cowboy steered toward them, they jumped out of the way, and when the bumper hit the steamer trunk, it tore most of the underpinnings from the Caddie and left it smoking in the wind. The hitchhikers then approached the chagrined cowboy with guns drawn, demanded that he remove all his clothing, and then they jumped in the next car that happened by, which happened to belong to the guys who'd hired them to get their revenge.

When Kenny isn't telling wild stories, he's reciting lengthy poems from memory. Topics are always rather earthy, ranging from getting kicked in the privates by a bull, to constipation, to a guy who fell too much in love with his horse--to the point of being arrested for crimes against nature.

I enjoy listening to Kenny's doggerel because he always delivers it with a great twang, a reverence for rhyme, and with a spot of tobacco on his lip. I told Kenny once that he ought to be a part of that celebration they hold in Elko each year, the one glorified in all the tourist brochures as though it's something special and unique.

But he told me what I'd already suspected: that there wasn't any real poetry going on at these gatherings, just a bunch of not-very-tough cowboys who want to be fawned over as though they had some special gift for language.

"The stuff I do is just nonsense," he says, "something for a laugh and to pass the time. Those guys at that poetry gathering are pretending to be something they're not. A true cowboy doesn't need all that fuss made over him."

I wish Kenny could speak some day with Jane Alexander, the actress who heads up the National Endowment for the Arts. A few years ago, she spoke in Las Vegas and in a patronizing way tried to throw a bone to the serious writers and painters and musicians in the room by telling us we should all be very proud of the growing arts community in Nevada, which was represented by such esteemed assemblies as the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko.

We all just looked around at each other, wondering who'd given Jane such poor advice about what our arts community is really all about.

If real cowboys like Kenny Coll don't take their rhyming verse seriously, then why should we?

I guess it all comes down to that age-old question: But is it art?

I look at cowboy and rodeo stories as great folklore and an important piece of western American history. Entertaining? Absolutely. Poetry? I think not.