Cowboy Poet Lee Wiley Burch Returns With ‘Stonecutter’

Out near Newcastle, where the pasture gives way to mesquite and the roads run long and quiet, Lee Wiley Burch has spent a lifetime turning the people and places around him into poetry.

Now, after more than 25 years of working on it, he is close to finishing his second book.

Stonecutter, expected out in April, gathers roughly 100 poems rooted in small towns, history and agriculture — the same subjects Burch has been circling since he was a boy.

“I’ve been writing since I was 10,” he said. “It’s about life in small towns… ag is part of my life and part of my family’s life.”

But this book will look different from his first.

Instead of presenting only the finished work, Stonecutter will show how the poems came to be — complete with handwritten drafts, crossouts and revisions. Mr. Burch said the idea took hold after he picked up country singer Rodney Crowell’s book Word for Word, which includes original lyric sheets.

“The original way he wrote them, with the scratchouts — you can tell who the human being was who wrote that,” he said. “It’s amazing how that personal touch sets that book off.”

He is now working with a graphic designer to preserve that process on the page, giving readers a look at the work behind the words.

“There’s a lot of love put into this,” he said.

The book itself has been a long time coming. Mr. Burch first assembled the poems in 1999, even lining up an introduction from western swing musician Jody Nix. But like a lot of things in Young County, it had to wait while life moved forward.

Mr. Burch graduated from Newcastle High School in 1972 and later taught agriculture at Olney High School from 1983 to 1989. He eventually settled between Newcastle and Graham, near Fort Belknap, where he and his wife, Janan, built a life that still revolves around work — ranching, a little farming and a welding business he continues to run.

“I’m still the owner of the company, and I do all the bookwork,” he said.

Through it all, he kept

writing.

His first book, Dreaming in Color: A Cowboy’s Collection of Lullabies, Legends, and Lies, published in 1997, found an audience among readers who recognized the people in his poems. Mr. Burch has a reputation for noticing what others miss — the small habits and details that define a person. “I take a person and go out and around and through him,” he said. “It’s the little details that matter. God’s been a big help,” he said. “I can tell when somebody is giving me these words.” His instinct has led friends and families to ask him to write obituaries over the years, some of which appeared in Dreaming in Color. That sense of calling runs through his work, including the poem “God, Family and Friends,” written after a car crash that killed his cousin and a close friend — the kind of moment Mr. Burch has spent a lifetime trying to put into words. With Stonecutter, he is not just sharing those words, but the years it took to find them.

“God, Family, and Friends” When our world seems to be just falling apart, And the sun refuses to shine, When the clouds of sorrow hang heavy above And we wish we could turn back the time, When each day seems longer and full of hurt And the road seems never to end, These are the times when it means the most To have God, family, and friends. I may never be rich with wealth untold, Nor a king with a silver crown I may never be a traveler to places afar Or write music with a golden sound. These things mean little to a man who’s down And whose heart is on the mend. But he has the cure within reach of his hands With his God, family, and friends.

- Lee Wiley Burch, June 1994