A big bad bull whipped me down': cowboy poetry, old art form of the US west, lassos a new generation

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/04/cowboy-poetry-new-generation

A big bad bull whipped me down’: cowboy poetry, old art form of the US west, lassos a new generation

From Los Angeles to Nevada, younger people are preserving a longstanding tradition one lyric at a time

Renée Reizman in Los Angeles with photographs by Adali Schell
Sun 4 Jan 2026 11.00 EST

Deep in the heart of Los Angeles’s Koreatown, just a few doors down from H Mart and a K-pop music superstore, an American flag hangs over the entrance of a saloon called Eastwood.

The western-themed bar would normally be cranking Luke Bryan while customers play skee-ball, line dance and get bucked off their mechanical bull named Gucci. But tonight, the music is low and the loudest sounds come from the clacking of vintage mechanical typewriters. About 30 people in the bar are drafting poems about horses, sunsets and Stetson hats – which are plentiful atop the heads in the crowd.

They’re here to take part in Cowboy Poetry Los Angeles, a collective dedicated to preserving the history of the American west through authentic storytelling. For city slickers unfamiliar with cowboy poetry, it’s a folk art that emerged from oral traditions. Around the 1870s, during long cattle drives west from Texas, men would trade stories and sing songs about their adventures on the frontier.

There’s a misconception that cowboy poetry is a dying art form, but some 150 years later, the movement is experiencing a revival. The Eastwood workshops are just one example of new poetry gatherings sprouting across the nation. In 2021, Dakota Holdaway established the Juab Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nephi, Utah. That same year, Leslie Miller launched the Rodear in Bridgeport, California, an arts and culture festival that highlights talent from young women across the west.

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