Cowboy poetry workshop set via internet

People may not be able to gather to share cowboy poetry at the moment with social distancing and stay-at-home directives in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but a group is offering a taste that could help people pass the time during social isolation.

The Medicine Hat Cowboy Poetry Foundation is offering online cowboy poetry workshops for adults and youth starting in two weeks.

“The purpose is to help students learn how to write and perform cowboy poetry,” workshop co-facilitator Jeannette Zollner said.

The requirements needed for this course, she said, are the desire to create and design poetry, an internet connection and a computer with audio and video.

For adults it is $20 and for children 17 and younger it is free.

People interested can register by calling Zollner at 403-529-6384, text at 403-548-1526 or emailing her at [email protected].

The deadline to register is Monday.

The workshop will be a four-week course, one hour each week, starting the week of April 20, through Zoom, she said.

Zollner said her friend Shelley Goldbeck, workshop co-facilitator, started the Medicine Hat Cowboy Poetry Foundation because they wanted to promote a “down-to-earth, wholesome and creative genre.”

“We wanted a day in which ranch and farm folk can have entertainment that pertains to and honors their rural way of life, now and how it used to be,” Zollner said.  “We’re also wanting to have young people learn that it’s not the Shakespeare stuff and it’s easier to compose than they might think.

Thus, came the idea to offer a workshop.

“We’re wanting to build community; a place and reason country folks can gather and where they can relate to the first-hand experiences in the material of the entertainers,” she said. “Maybe city folk will also get to know a little something about us rural folk.”

She said she and the foundation are putting together a guidebook for the workshops that will give out tips and help with:

• Deciding what to write about;

• Guidance in how to make it into a poem or song;

• Getting ideas for performing it well;

• Giving out helpful resources such as cowboy idioms, rhyming dictionaries, how to look good on Zoom and more.

“The fifth (workshop) class is an opportunity to be a performer, a cowboy poet with a virtual audience,” she said. “This will be recorded.”

The next round of cowboy poetry workshops is planned to start Oct. 17, 2020, she said.