They are authentic American voices, natural storytellers who know how to fashion everyday experience into art without violating the source of their inspiration. Elko resurrected voices that gave back to the American West the gift of its tradition, and now a university professor was amplifying the voices far outside their traditional circles to listeners amazed at what they heard and eager to spread word of the revived tradition to others. And he talked of perhaps finding a potential network of stagings for this new theater in the missionary outposts created by the Elko revival, in the hundreds of cowboy poetry gatherings growing from the scattered seed of the fruit of its tree. One of the newer, smaller and more isolated of the cowboy poetry gatherings was organized in the fall of 1993 at Nara Visa, New Mexico. Sessions and shows are not organized until everyone arrives on Friday evening.
Parking is in surrounding pastures.
Line dancing in discouraged. Rooster Morris is a young cowboy who is foreman of the Spring Creek Ranch, one of the better ranches that occupy land originally under XIT fence. Although he lives only thirty or so miles from Nara Visa, he would not go to the first Nara Visa gathering because he thought cowboy poetry gatherings to be phony business. Besides, he said, he rarely picked up the fiddle or guitar anymore. But through the following year friends and neighbors softened him up and he drove over to the second Nara Visa gathering to join the festivities.