The Modern Cowboy by John R. Erickson (review)

294 Western American Literature T. S. Eliot, oftentimes Rothenberg’s arch-enemy, argued that poets are uniquely suited to be literary critics, though much later in his life he also confessed that much of his own criticism was intended as an apology for his own work and the work of like-minded friends. Rothenberg is no less determined to defend his own poetics (and poetry) and the work of likeminded predecessors and contemporaries. Yet, what impresses one is his openness about doing so, the extraordinary range of the subjects and tradi­ tions he draws on for inspiration and support, and the singlemindedness with which he develops and then espouses his own “vision” of poetry. My head was filled with Stein & Cummings; later with Williams, Pound, the French Surrealists, the Dada poets who made “pure sound” three decades earlier. Blues. American Indian things from Densmore. Cathay. Bible, Shakespeare, Whitman, Jewish liturgies. Dali & Lorca were ferocious possibilities. . . . In all he does, Rothenberg is determined to advance the cause of a poetry and a poetics that resist closure, formalization and generalization. Instead, he argues for a poetry “which takes vision and conflict as the essential characteristics . . .” and which draws us “back, by whatever routes, to reach the first mythologized shamans of the later paleolithic cultures.” For those readers brought up on the canons of New Criticism this book will serve as a challenging and disturbing counterpoint. ALAN STEINBERG Idaho State University The Modern Cowboy. By John R. Erickson. Photographs by Kris Erickson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. xii + 248 pages, bibliog­ raphy, $15.95.) Most working cowboys do not write books, or much else, for that matter. We get an Andy Adams or Charles Siringo once in a while, but cowboy authors are relatively rare. Although he grew up in and was greatly influenced by cattle country, Larry McMurtry fled the scene. And a new­ comer like Thomas McGuane in An Outside Chance can write an excellent piece on roping. Neither, however, has ever earned his keep cowboying. John Erickson has, and fortunately has decided to talk about the cowboy’s lot in The Modern Cowboy. The author quickly alerts his readers that his Reviews 295 experiences were picked up in the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles and what he says about cowboy work and gear might change region to region. Handling cattle in dense brush country requires different tactics than moving a herd out of a mountain pasture. Regional variations aside, Erickson has caught the ambience of the working cowboy, what he loves to do, and what he must do to keep a ranch operating day-to-day and season-to-season. In doing this, he actually provides an account of how much cowboying has changed in the hundred or so years of its existence. The old time hand simply would not do a job that couldn’t be done horseback. Erickson devotes sections to building fences, winter feeding, repairing windmills, and haying, the latter being much like the old joke about hitting yourself in the head with a hammer — it feels so good when you quit. Even though it is a survey of cowboying, Erickson’s prose is neither too simple nor too technical. He can debate the virtues or the weaknesses of hedge, cedar, pine, or steel fence posts, explain a water gap, relate with compassion the kind of life a cowboy’s wife might have to lead, and wax rhapsodic about what keeps cowboys on the job despite the risks and gen­ erally low pay. To his credit, Erickson does not try to romanticize the profession. Pulling calves is neither glamorous nor much fun and one of Kris Erickson’s photographs shows a cowboy treating a heifer for bloat, an affliction whose very name describes its inelegance. Erickson spends considerable time in various spots throughout the book trying to define and exemplify a kind of cowboy code of behavior and in the attempt, pokes holes in some misconceptions about the breed: that the cowboy is not quite so free and independent as most of us wish to believe, for example. Like McMurtry, he has a fine ear for language and relays some of the sayings he has gotten along the...