Wolf Tracks on the Welcome Mat

By Allen M. Jones, 8-04-05

Despite the proliferation of cowboy poems and poetry gatherings, New Mexico to Montana – the thousands of paeans written to spring branding and calf pulling, the odes to beloved ponies, to haying and feeding and shoeing – there aren’t more than a few genuine, sure-fire cowboy poets out there. Cowboy rhymers and lyricists, sure; cowboy limerick writers, joke tellers, you bet. But poets? Count em on a couple of hands.

A quick definition: First and last, poetry is about language. It’s about using words the way spelunkers use flashlights. It’s a stretching of syllables, a stacking of sentences, a carving out of verses into stained-glass patterns until you find art. Cowboy poetry, it’s always seemed to me, too often hides behind pure narrative. Stories with lines that don’t go all the way to the margin; jokes told in a provincial argot and a fixed set of referents, a set of simple rhyme schemes. It’s entertainment, and most of it’s been done before. When a real poet, a true original, rises up out of the dust of this herd, he’s justifiably celebrated. Think of Wallace McRae and how he occasionally steps on the third rail of genius. (The fact that Wally wasn’t named Montana’s first poet laureate is a crime of the sort that should have already sent somebody or other to Deer Lodge.) There’s Linda Hasselstrom, she’s pretty good, and Waddie Mitchell who, when he stops clowning around for five minutes, can cut quick to the heart of things. Then of course there’s Paul Zarzyski.

It’s been my considered opinion for some years (I used to regularly publish his work in my own little magazine) that Zarzyski – who happens to wear a cowboy hat, who’s a perennial favorite at Elko, who’s ridden rough stock and fed out flakes of hay – is one of the top notch working poets in the country. Poet, period. No antecedents, no qualifiers. Recipient of the 2005 Montana Governor’s Arts Award for Literature (putting him in the company of Ivan Doig, James Welch, Thomas McGuane...), his ninth and most recent book, the Spur Award winning Wolf Tracks on the Welcome Mat, stands comfortably shoulder to shoulder with the three other significant volumes produced out of Montana, Richard Hugo’s Selected Poems, McRae’s Cowboy Curmudgeon and Welch’s Riding the Earthboy 40. It’s a top notch book from one of the West’s most accomplished poets.

A student of Hugo’s, Zarzyski has inherited a healthy dollop of the big man’s blue collar pragmatism, his beer and bratwurst approach to the page. He’s a writer who insists on readability. In the world that Zarzyski inhabits, an opaque, obscure poem is no poem at all. In the second little gem of Wolf Tracks, a poem called "The Meaning of Intimacy," he describes holding his cheek to the muzzle of a colt as he feeds him hay. “My heart beats brisk / time to the rhythm of grinding teeth / crunching tiny pipettes of perfume – sweet / breath and music piped through the pink / nostrils into February air, so still..." A mundane experience filtered through a love of words, squeezed dry and given it back to us in such a way that see both the accuracy and the freshness of the vision. Tiny pipettes of perfume, breath and music piped through pink nostrils. That’s by god the way it is, and next time you smell hay, you’re going to smell it fresh in a new context. Seems like most ranchers would do well to carve these words into the stoops of their horse barns.

A sampling of the titles in Wolf Tracks shows a sense of verbal playfulness that’s rare (indeed, almost nonexistent) in the professional poetry community. Maybe it’s an inheritance from the cowboy poetry circuit. There’s “Putting the Rodeo Try into Cowboy Poetry" and there’s “Antipasto!" (“The tongue loves Antipasto! The linguini way / each button-mushroom syllable – gold / nubbin plucked from hardwood stump – lingers / toward the uvula..."); there’s “Bizarzyski – Mad Bard and Carpenter Savant of Manchester, Montana – Feeds the Finicky Birds." and. “How the Beluga Spoons." This is joy at the marble-in-mouth tastebud-tang and roll of a good string of syllables. Nothing more nor less. In this regard, one of his most enjoyable poems (although not his best), is simply called “Potatoes." Presumably conceived as a performance piece (the audience is referred to as “you folks"), you can easily picture him ambling back and forth across the stage with a microphone, rolling through a laundry list of beloved sounds: “You got your Yukon / Golds, your Fingerlings and Yellow Finns, your Chieftains, / your Chippewas, Kennebecs, Burbank Russets, Early Gems, your Colorado Longs and Pontiac Reds..." A few lines later, six vodkas into an airline flight, he describes how he was “scalloped, twice-baked, platskied, jo jo’d, / au gratined, shoestringed, mashed, colcannoned, vichyssoised, / hashbrowned and having green potato skin / hallucinogen flashbacks..."

His self-effacement and lighthearted bon mots serve, through contrast, to put an extra emotional whoomph behind his more poignant poems. Zarzyski’s a kind man, a conscientious guy, a ruminator who considers his impact on the world and on the people around him, and this kindness comes through in his work. In “Imperfect Strangers," he regrets a chance encounter with a drunk on the guy’s birthday, not buying a beer for his “one big night alone." In “The Hand," an invective against racism, he recreates an encounter between a white aristocrat and an elderly black man. In “Carnivore," he considers a freezer shelf of venison: “how we kill to eat, and eat / to kill again, and how we love, / between the seasons we set aside for killing, / to see the living / go on living? We owe our prey some grace, / some contemplation of their lives / here with us." And in one of the book’s last poems, “For One Micro-Chronon of Time," a brilliant consideration of 9/11, he writes, with a tender soupcon of heartbreaking hope:

...Notice – this time,
your eyes closed, your heartbeat
stilled – how those there witnessing
the one-by-one acceleration of the towers’ top floors
buckling, all threw their arms up
in New York unison. Against the looming black
weight, imagine, feel, how they strained
to lock into place with their power-
lifting lumbar – with their knees,
shoulders, elbows, fingers, toes,
sinew and soul – the tonnage
they knew they could hold aloft..."

Within the insulated, academic world of poetry readers, writers, and reviewers (three hats consistently worn by the same half-dozen, tenured folks), it’s endlessly lamented that the discipline has become irrelevant, that it’s not reaching the larger public, that it’s lost its standing as an art form. One has only to read through a few dozen of the pieces published in, say, The New Yorker, to understand why. There’s a safe and bland sameness in this work that very nearly begs the average, educated reader to turn the page. Where’s our Ogden Nash? Where’s our Stephen Vincent Benet? Where’s a backfiring jalopy and short-fused firecracker? Mostly gone, hounded out past the hedges by workshops and a circle jerk of critics lauding each other’s mediocre work. In this context, Paul Zarzyski and his Wolf Tracks are lifesavers, a pair of water wings thrown out to a drowning discipline.


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