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Show UTAH'S POETS AND THEIR POETRY From the first company of Mormon pioneers who arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in the summer of 1847, to the contemporary residents of this state, Utahns have maintained a strong tradition of writing history, biography, song lyrics, poetry and other forms of the written word. Perhaps this early and continued interest in literary art can be attributed in part to the Mormon Church's meticulous, historical record keeping and its encouragement of members to keep similar records in the form of journals and personal histories. Yet whatever the impetus and regardless of the chosen form, these records of personal and community experience invariably chronicle "the memories, the faith and the hopes which have given meaning to [their] lives." (Saints of Sage and Saddle, p. 316) Songs, the texts of which are really poems, represent a large segment of this writing and most belong to that body of unattributed work which is adopted, modified and cherished by the community and is defined as a folksong. As the Fifes explained in the epilogue to their landmark study on Mormon folkways, Saints of Sage and Saddle, So abundant are the songs that the Mormon folk have composed and sung at all of the critical moments in their history that, were every other document destroyed, it would still be possible, from their folk songs alone, to reconstruct in some detail, the story of their theology, their migrations, their conflict with the Gentiles [all non-Mormons], and the founding and development of most of their settlements from New York to San Bernardino, (p. 316, 1980) Cowboy Poetry From Utah 15 |