Speaker says poetry should be accurate

Yvonne Hollenbeck, who lives with her husband Glen on a ranch in south central South Dakota, said her poetry grows out of her everyday experiences.

“The more I do on the ranch, the more ideas pop up,” she said. “It’s about gotten to the point where my husband is about afraid to ask me to help him because he thinks something may happen and I’ll write a poem about it.”

She added that he always calls her “honey” when he needs her help, and admitted that some of the poems make him look a little silly. One of them told of his invitation to take her to town for dinner. She fixed her hair, dressed up and was in a romantic mood as they hopped into the pickup, but her attitude changed a bit when they wound up going to a pancake supper put on by a feed store.

Another told of her efforts to figure out her husband’s hand signals while they were sorting cattle and she was running the gate. She noted that in this era of high technology, there’s still no way to interpret all of his gestures.

Hollenbeck also recited poems about her grandmother’s wood-burning kitchen stove, “the old folks rodeo,” a marriage (not hers) that turned to disaster when the couple bought a motorcycle and headed for Sturgis, “Nature’s Church” and “Why Jane Left Ted.”

In the latter poem she theorized that after Ted Turner bought so much land in Nebraska and other states, his wife, actress Jane Fonda, fled the scene because she grew tired of opening so many gates as they rode across the prairie in a pickup checking out their buffalo and working so many long hours to keep the operation running.

Hollenbeck’s poem called “What Would Martha Do?” was written after she’d spent seven hours fighting a prairie fire and turned on the TV about 10 o’clock at night to see if there was any chance of rain.

The channel that popped up showed Martha Stewart demonstating how to properly iron table linens. Somewhat out of disgust, Hollenbeck was inspired to write the poem. She added that initially she didn’t plan to publish it, but it became the No. 1 requested poem of the year according to the Western Music Association.

The honor is one of several that Hollenbeck has received.

Her latest book, “From My Window,” recently earned the Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award, making her the first author to win the award twice.

She also received the Female Poet of the Year Award from the Academy of Western Artists in 2005 and was a first place winner at the Cowboy Poetry Rodeo in Kanab, Utah, in 2003.

Hollenbeck is the daughter of noted fiddler Harry Hanson and is a 1963 graduate of Gordon High School. One of the Hollenbecks’ daughters, Teresa, who lives in Scottsbluff and is married to Mike Halley, graduated from Chadron State.

The speaker urged those in the audience who are interested in writing poetry to be accurate and to not overly glamorize the poems because they become history. She said someone might read or recite the work many years from now and be misled by how times really were when the poem was written if they aren’t accurate.

Hollenbeck’s appearance Monday night was sponsored by the Nekota Reading Council and Chadron State. She will return to the college on Nov. 2 and 3 for the third annual CSC Cowboy Poetry Gathering. She also was a presenter at the first gathering in January 2006.

At the end of September, she will participate in the World’s Only Cowboy Poetry Rodeo in Hot Springs.

Altogether, she is scheduled to appear in nine states the last five months of this year.