by Fran Jurga | 13 December 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog at Hoofcare.com
It's Sunday morning, which means that I'm allowed to lighten up a bit and hopefully make you smile. A new friend of this blog is farrier Andy Nelson, from the Nelson family of farriers in Wyoming. But Andy's been working on a second career, and he's made quite a name for himself and his experiences as a farrier by documenting his life in the rhymes of cowboy poetry.
Since Christmas is coming, I thought I would post a couple of Andy's poems over the next few weeks and perhaps you'll head to his web site and order a cd, hire him as a entertainer or at least have some more laughs.
Farriers are often the subject of poems. Shakespeare waxed poetic about the smithy, Longfellow immortalized the chestnut tree shaded forge, and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Poetry, in part, I always like to think, by inverting Longfellow's romantic hero in "Door into the Dark (The Forge)". The first book ever published by Hoofcare Publishing was The Smith Writes Back, an anthology of farrier and blacksmith poetry for a staged poetry reading by farriers at Cornell University.
Andy Nelson will sure to be included in volume two of that book! Visit www.cowpokepoet.com to learn lots more about him and buy his cds.
Note: I normally bristle when people make jokes about farriers, but when a farrier pokes jokes at himself, I think it's ok. The meaning of the title is based on a play on words on a wrestling move, but refers to the Nelson family business. As you can probably tell, I made the media file and Google seems to have cut off some of the artwork. I am sorry...and if anyone can coach me through a way to fix it, I'll be glad to.
© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask.
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