Drummond Hadley said he wasn’t a cowboy poet — he was a poet who was also a cowboy.
Hadley,
77 and a longtime Southern Arizonan, died Nov. 26 at his mother’s
family’s home in Cooperstown, New York. Following a long illness, his
death closes a career that included five published books, study under
some of poetry’s greatest names of the 1960s and ‘70s, four decades of
ranching in the Arizona-New Mexico borderlands, and leadership of a
pioneering conservation organization of the Southwest.
An heir of
the Anheuser-Busch family of St. Louis, he found common ground with
border-area residents of all incomes and backgrounds.
“It is amazing how a regular guy knew so many super poets,” said Ross Humphreys, owner of three Southern Arizona ranches.
Rio
Nuevo Publishers, owned by Humphreys, published Hadley’s landmark 2005
collection, “Voice of the Borderlands,” which sought to tell of the
region’s people and landscape through narrative poetry.
...Humphreys was speaking of Hadley’s longtime work and friendship with
poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and
his association with the late Charles Olson. Olson, who mentored
Hadley’s work many years ago, was considered a bridge between classical,
mid-20th century figures such as Ezra Pound and Williams Carlos
Williams and New American poets of the ‘60s such as Ginsberg.
...Born in St. Louis County, Missouri, on May 27, 1938, Hadley attended
schools in St. Louis and graduated from the private Pomfret Academy prep
school in Connecticut in 1956. He earned a B.A. in English literature
in 1962 and an M.F.A. in literature in 1965 from UA.
He started
writing poetry during the early 1960s, and later was befriended by New
American poets such as Snyder and Ginsburg. In the preface to “Voice of
the Borderlands,” Hadley explained his entry into ranching at around the
same time:
“In the early 1960s, I left academia and got a job as a
cowboy in the Southwestern Borderlands,” he wrote. “I took these as
given as I do now: that we are created in the image of the earth, and
that we become what surrounds us.
“I wanted to explore the
possibility that the language used by cowboys and vaqueros would reflect
some essence of the rough mountains, mesas and arroyos of the Sonoran
and Chihuahuan Deserts, in which they worked cattle and horses. I
imagined that words might have an other than intellectual origin and
understanding, that they might be rather of the body’s blood, the sweat
and tears of loss and circumstance,” Hadley wrote.
In the 1960s,
he worked as a cowboy on the Ella Dana and Dart ranches in Cochise
County, Rancho San Bernardino in Sonora and the WS Ranch in northern New
Mexico. In 1972, he moved with his family to Guadalupe Ranch in the
Guadalupe Canyon area, a remote slice of southeast Arizona.
In the early 1990s, he and his neighbors and friends, including Warner and Wendy Glenn and Bill and Mary McDonald,
helped establish the Malpais Borderlands Group. It’s a nonprofit
organization dedicated to conservation ranching, fire ecology and
open-space protection.
Around the same time, Hadley was
instrumental in transferring the 272,000-acre Gray Ranch in the Animas
Mountains in southwest New Mexico from the Nature Conservancy to the
Animas Foundation, which he helped found.
By 2005, the Malpais
Borderlands area encompassed 800,000 acres of private, federal and state
land, and had developed an international reputation for trying to
balance ranching and conservation, wrote Nathan Sayre in his book, “Working Wilderness: The Malpais Borderlands Group and the future of the Western Range.”
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