Cowboy Poetry: A Woman Ranching the Rockies, the Miracle of Peggy Godfrey (review)

The 2011 Oral History Association meeting in Denver, Colorado, began with a Wednesday Evening Film Screening event, which included, among other films, a fifteen-minute excerpt of Cowboy Poetry: A Woman Ranching the Rockies, followed by a live poetry reading by Peggy Godfrey, the focus of the film. The poems she presented that evening are also included on the DVD produced by Kent Gunnufson. The DVD contains the main film, a poetry series where the viewer can select twelve different poems to be read by Peggy in different outdoor settings, outtakes, and a clip of an interview with ranch owner Skip Crowe who employed Peggy as a cowhand and talks about her work as a cowboy.

The film documents the life of Peggy Godfrey, a rancher, wife, mother, poet, and cowboy in Moffat, Colorado. She is involved in multiple undertakings such as sheep lawn care services, welding, and selling collapsible cowboy hats. As the film notes, Godfrey is not the wife of a cowboy, but a cowboy in her own right. She raises cattle and sheep; cuts and bales her own hay; corrals, inoculates, and brands cattle alongside other cowboys; and spends many a cold night in freezing temperatures helping deliver the winter calves. Anyone who has ever helped deliver calves or any type of livestock in the confines of a barn or shed with lighting, including this writer, knows that the work can be long and tedious, let alone doing it outdoors in subzero weather on the night shift. Ranching is by no means easy work, and being a cowboy is anything but an eight-to-five, Monday-through-Friday, paid holidays with an allotment of sick days type of job. The use of video footage in this project has an advantage over the printed word and the use of audio-only interviews that might have been employed in other oral history projects. By conducting some of the interviews outdoors, the producer was able to effectively convey the reality of ranch life.

Overall, the film does a good job of bringing to light not only the subject matter of a female cowboy and of cowboy poetry as a genre but also of introducing us to the multifaceted Godfrey. The film uses a variety of interviews with Godfrey and Crowe along with short interview segments with another cowhand, a retired clergyman who talks about her poetry, and a friend to whom she donated a kidney and with whom she has had a long friendship, among others. The use of film in this case to conduct oral history allows you to step into the world of ranching, if only briefly, and relate to Godfrey. Her immense connection to, respect for, and soulful understanding of the land can only truly be comprehended as one watches her sun-kissed face tell a story beyond her own words that no audio-only interview could do justice.

Even though we are introduced to Godfrey's cowboy poetry, the viewer is left without much context into how she fits into the field of cowboy poetry and how other cowboy poets perceive her. Although a short interview is shown with Thomas Ehrhardt, a retired clergyman in Moffat, Colorado, who brings some perspective to her poetry, an interview with another cowboy poet could have given the viewer a broader understanding of how she fits into the genre. Another option would have been to see if any oral history interviews previously existed with other cowboy poets that could have been used to help the viewer understand the history and field of cowboy poetry a little better.

Although the viewer gets some perspective on the life of Godfrey as a rancher, the viewer does not gain much perspective on the presumable rarity of female cowboys and what other cowboys think of Godfrey and her place in the field in the main part of the film. Curiously, this...