ENTRIES:
Close Encounters—The Interview
Commencement
Putting the Bite into Cowboy Poetry
Newsflash: 01-13-08
Newsflash: 11-28-2007
Proclamation/Preview
Newsflash: 10-04-2007
Making Wood
Postscript to Making Wood
Tom Russell/Cowboys & Indians
Western Horseman review
Tom Russell review
Ray March review
Red Shuttleworth
Happy Birthday Paul!
(News?) Flash: 4-24-2007
© Paul Zarzyski. All rights reserved. These words may not be reprinted or reposted without the author's written permission.
NEWSFLASH: January 13, 2008
I talk often on the phone to my good friend Wally McRae—quintessential Cowboy Poet extraordinaire to the umpteenth power magnified a thousand fold, times 2. Wally’s coming 72 next month. He’s got me by purt-near 15 ½ years, yet on most (thank goodness, not all) matters philosophical, political, artistic and gastronomic, we find common ground upon which to celebrate the strength of our friendship and to learn from one another. Lately we’ve been talking a lot about mortality—that old saw about being able to take nothing materialistic with us over The Great Divide and out into The Cowpoke Cosmos, The Musical Universe—ashes to ashes, dust to nebular dust and all that unromantic rot. I told Wally about The 5-W new year’s resolution I concocted for myself a few years ago and will likely readopt, reaffirm, recycle, reincarnate for the remainder of my January firsts: Write (Poems). Work-out (exercise). Work (make a living). Winnow (possessions). Ween (let the negative go). It just this instant occurs to me that I likely could place most of the poems and song lyrics I’ve written over the past 35 years under one of these 5 categories. In any case, Wally and I have both been focused a lot lately on W-4, Winnow—lightening the load, thinning the herd, use-it-up/toss-it-out/pass-it-on, yadda-yadda-yadda….
Wally refers to the endeavor, in cattle-ranching nomenclature, as making the sort. Recently he’s been sorting through old mail and came upon a ditty I’d sent him back in the last millennium. Notice that I did not qualify the piece as a poem. Wasn’t it Frost who said—and I paraphrase here—I never write exercises, but sometimes I write poems that don’t work and so I call them ‘exercises’? Well I call the works, which I can’t taunt and torment, tempt and toil into poetic existence, ditties. And I suppose the dittification of this piece had more than a little to do with realizing after several drafts that I had subconsciously filched the theme AND the refrain from a George Carlin LP I know I still own and wish I could locate here in the archeological digs/debris/detritus of my surroundings. In fact, Las Vegas oddmakers would’ve deemed my chances of even finding a copy of this ditty, titled STUFF!, 56 ½ to 1. But here it is, thanks to Wally’s Winnowings—thanks and no thanks, maybe I should’ve said. EXCEPT, that it prompted this long overdue NEWSFLASH and, moreover, provided an opportunity to offer what I believe will become an honest-to-goodness poem I’ve been nurturing over the past 3 months or so—a poem, titled Leaping None Too Soon Into Lightness, also fitting under The 4th W and highlighting the flip-side to the ditty, STUFF! Which, by the way, was originally dedicated solely to my yard-saling aficionada friend, Barbara McFarlane, but now is dedicated to both Barb and Mister Carlin.
[STUFF!]
