Word camedown last week that Wallace McRae is dead. He wa...

Word camedown last week that Wallace McRae is dead.

He was among the handful of cowboy poets behind the rebirth of our art andcraft in the mid-1980s, and his passing is a loss from which we will neverrecover.

The word “curmudgeon” was as firmly affixed to McRae as his bushy mustache, andit was a description I believe he carried with pride. To many, he came acrossas gruff. But underlying that gruffness were two simple facts: he had a lowtolerance for bullshit, and he did not suffer fools gladly.

McRae was a poet. More than a mere rhymer, jokester, versifier, or entertainer,he wrangled words to create well-crafted poetry that spoke of the West inlayers that plumbed the depths, asking questions and demanding thought. Youwill not find among his work the cheap emotion, the manufactured pride, the manipulativehumor so often found in cowboy poetry.

I did not know McRae well. We were well enough acquainted to speak, but it’snot like we were drinking buddies. Back in 2016, he agreed to be interviewedfor a magazine article I was working on, and we had a good, long talk at theNational Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. I got what I needed for thestory, and I got a lot more than I expected.

We talked about his early exposure to poetry, including his first publicrecitation at age four at a community Christmas celebration. And his exposureat an early age to one of the greatest cowboy poets of all time: “We got alivestock publication, my dad did, I don’t know what the title of it was, butit had a monthly Bruce Kiskaddon illustrated poem in it. . . . I knew Kiskaddonbefore I could read.”

I asked his opinion on what Kiskaddon and other earlymasters—Badger Clark, S. Omar Barker, and others—might think of today’s cowboypoetry. “My guess is, I think they would for the most part feel that we’retrying hard. But maybe not measuring up. Because so few people are trained nowin writing. They haven’t read the classics. We haven’t studied the art enough.. . . I don’t think there’s enough of us that study poetry.”

McRae’s honors are too many to mention. But his legacy is one we shouldtreasure—and we could all benefit from reading and rereading and studying hispoetry. He was one of the best of us. And now he is gone.