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“People say, ‘So you are a cowboy poet?’ I say, ‘No, I’m a rodeo poet,” said Zarzyski, who’ll perform Saturday in Olympia as part of “Don’t Fence Me In,” an evening of music and poetry celebrating the American West.
“But first and foremost, I’m a human-being poet on Planet Earth.”
What he means is, there’s something universal about the West and its enduring appeal. “In everybody’s heart, there’s a little connection with the American West — even if it’s just embracing the Hollywood cowboy.”
So when he celebrates the West, he welcomes everyone to join him. “Before it can be regional, it has to be human,” he said. “It’s not the West against the East, or the rancher against the environmentalist.
“We are all forked to this bucking horse named Planet Earth together.”
Joining him in the celebration at “Don’t Fence Me In” are the yodeling Wiley & the Wild West, Native American drummers North Bear, fiddling trio The Quebe Sisters Band, and Tex-Mex quartet Los Texmexicanos.
“I’m the cricket amongst a herd of Tyrannosaurus rex,” he said. “I’m the poet.”
Which is not to say that what he does is not musical. “I learned from Richard Hugo everything I know about poetry. He said, ‘If you want to become a poet, you fall in love with the sound of words and concentrate on the music.’ ”
He’s also collaborated on songwriting with Wiley Gustafson of Wiley & the Wild West. Not surprisingly, lyrics are his specialty. “We try to illustrate to the audience that there really is some common ground between the lyric and the poem,” Zarzyski said. “So he might sing one of the songs that we’ve co-written, and I might offer a preamble to it.”
Zarzyski grew up in Wisconsin, and neither horsemanship nor poetry was much on his radar — until a college professor introduced him to the work of Paul Zimmer, writer of such poems as “Zimmer Drunk and Alone, Dreaming of Old Football Games.”
“I realized that there are living poets on the planet and they are actually writing about my life,” he said. “I had a hunch that my life was worthy of poetry.”
As his bio puts it, it was after college that he heeded Horace Greeley’s celebrated advice, “Go west, young man, go west.”
He got a master of fine arts degree from the University of Montana, where he studied with Hugo, who was born in White Center, Wash., and often wrote about the Pacific Northwest.
“He put it in a nutshell,” Zarzyski said. “Don’t worry about the deep hidden meaning. Don’t worry about the rules. There are no rules — well, just one: Don’t be boring.
“I think that’s a good tenet to apply to your whole life.”
Zarzyski’s rodeo career began when he arrived in Montana and attended perhaps the second rodeo of his life. “I watched those cowboys rocketing out on those bucking horses. I said, ‘I know we live multiple lives because I have done that before, and I want to do it again.’”
And he did, getting bucked and getting back on till he learned. “I pursued those bucking horses for about a dozen years,” he said.
His poetry career has now lasted more than 40 years, with highlights including winning the 2005 Montana Governor’s Arts Award for Literature, and performing at the National Book Festival, the National Folk Festival, the Kennedy Center and on “A Prairie Home Companion.”
He’s been compared to Yoda, for reasons he can’t fathom, and to Jack Kerouac. “Zarzyski alternates between bluster and lyricism,” Megan Harlan wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “For the former, he uses lopingly metered stanzas and punch-drunk, self-mythologizing bravura. ... But he proves equally adept at meditative free verse.”
“Those were two of my biggest adventures: learning that my life was worthy of art, and worthy of creativity, and worthy of poetry and learning to ride a bucking horse.”
No wonder, then, that he put them together. “What I do when I come to the page,” he said, “is try to make every line a jumping, kick-spur ride.” ‘Don’t Fence Me In: Songs, Music and Poetry of the American West’
What: Rodeo poet Paul Zarzyski is part of an evening of cowboy songs and poetry, yodeling, swing fiddle, Tex-Mex polkas and Northern Plains drumming from the National Council for the Traditional Arts.
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: The Washington Center for the Performing Arts, 512 Washington St. S.E., Olympia
Tickets: $15-$35 adults; $13-$32 seniors, students and military; $7.50-$17.50 youth
For information: 360-753-8586
On video: Zarzyski’s poem “Black Upon Tan” at youtube.com/watch?v=q4QIWmYmFlE
