For Ken Cook of Martin, South Dakota—poet, performer, and ranch hand—inspiration is the easy part.
“If you have an ounce of creativity in you,” he says, “if you come to this country and go to the sandhills, where good horses and cattle are raised and the families have been for generations, there’s poetry all around.”
Cook is a 2025 Midwest Culture Bearer awardee. His work is “the poetry of the working cowboy,” flowing from years of hard work on horseback, chasing cattle and building a life.
Cowboy poetry—a name that Cook says some appreciate and others find limiting—stretches back to the 19th century. Cowboys put their stories of trailing cattle and braving fearsome weather into rhyme so they could remember, he says. “Stories turned into songs and poems. And it continues to this day.”
Cook was a full-time rancher for decades, but he started as an actor. He studied Theatre Arts at Southern Utah State College, performed at the renowned Utah Shakespeare Festival, and was considering grad school. But his father’s passing brought Cook to a crossroads.
He decided to move to the upper Great Plains, where he’d spent summers ranching with his mother’s family in Nebraska and South Dakota.
“I loved it as much as I loved acting,” says Cook. “I came back and rebuilt a life here, and it’s been a wonderful life. But boy, you can’t get rid of that other itch.”
As a rancher, Cook found himself jotting down his experiences on the job. (“Having a major in Theatre Arts and a minor in English Lit, you’re bound to pick up a pencil whether you’re a cowboy or not,” he says.) In 1987, when he received Waddie Mitchell’s Christmas Poems with a note saying, “Read this aloud,” and heard the legendary Baxter Black recite cowboy poetry to a packed gymnasium in Martin, Cook realized how to scratch that itch.
“From there on,” he says, “I was writing poetry.”
Now, Cook is a veteran of the genre. He was the 2010 Academy of Western Artists Poet of the Year and a founding member of CowboyPoetry.com. While a core feature of his work is live performance, his poems have been featured in The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering Anthology and on several poetry CDs. He partners with singer-songwriter Paul Larson for Cowboy Culture South Dakota Style, bringing cowhands and city-folks to tears—of both laughter and poignancy—with stories of this ever-vibrant way of life.
“There are gatherings clear across the West, thousands of people, to come and listen to cowboy music and poetry about the working cowboy,” says Cook. “Who wants to listen? A lot of people.”
The enthusiasm is especially meaningful in an artform that stems from deeply personal stories of triumph, heartbreak, humor, and love.
“All four of my kids were ranch-raised,” Cook says. “Hayfields, building fence, moving cattle, we all did it together. The most wonderful times of my life was spent with family doing this. The role family played [in my poetry] . . . it’s not everything, but it’s everything.”
Receiving the Midwest Culture Bearer Award has “spurred me on,” he says. “Keep telling your stories. People are listening.”
Bloodlines
An excerpt from Ken Cook’s ‘Bloodlines’
Now over the years our horses improved because me and my crew did the same.
Gosh I enjoy horseback in the sand with cowboys who share my last name.
No matter the job or which neighbor we help, very seldom we’ll be poorly mounted.
As their Dad I’m amazed by the kids that we’ve raised, our blessings are gratefully counted.
Still our horses aren’t the kind whose bloodlines run real deep,
but the cowboys who are riding them, their bloodline is mine to keep.
