Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast. Let me take you something

about myself. I am very obsessed is a big word but I'm going to use it obsessed with the

wild west always have been as a little kid I used to fold up my cushion put it over the

arm of our sofa and pretend it was a saddle, I'd wear a full cow-buy outfit,

and I would watch the many, many Western-themed TV shows that were kicking around in the late 60s and early 70s and as I got older I did the

ranch holiday thing in Montana. I went to Cody, Wyoming where a Buffalo Bill set up a town. I went to rodeos. I went to Tombstone, the Alamo. I did all those pilgrimages to famous Western sites. I own, get ready for this, a John Wayne

Cuckoo clock. So that's how it is with me. So I heard on an American

podcast, I heard a poem which was called A B Sidarian Western and because of the Western theme of course I was

immediately drawn in. There is a genre called cowboy poetry which is about Stetsons and Saddles and

old Pete sitting by the campfire. I'm generalizing it obviously as in all

genres of poetry there is a great range but I would say generally speaking

cowboy poetry is a traditional regularly rhymed, regular meter.

It's a sort of melancholy yearning for simpler times when men were men and did what they had to do. A, B, C. D. D. D. C. D. D. D. A. C. D. D. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. like that it has some of those elements but it has a dark a dark core to it I'm going to

read you a bit of of this poem it it's concerned with the violent of activities of the

protagonist. The protagonist is a Western figure but he is immensely violent. I would

say that his violence as a sort of Baroque nature to it. It is

ornate and unusual and unexpected.

Let me give you a little, almost literally a slice of life of this Western figure.

Jackal Shack full of hunched men.

Kick that hut down,

limped them with shots.

Morning to scalp them, noontime sang,

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