And listen to them they do from nine in the morning till 11 at night with four different performances at any one time each

And listen to them they do, from nine in the morning till 11 at night, with four different performances at any one time, each packed to capacity. All chattering stops as Rieman's melodious voice soars up in Badger Clark's ``Cowboy's Prayer'':Make me as big and open as the plains,As honest as the hoss between my kneesClean as the wind that blows behind the rainsFree as the hawk that circles down the breeze!Out West, ballad recitation (and ballad composition) has a long history, going back to the epic cattle drives of the 1870s. Tongue-tied and bashful, she doesn't linger in the bar like the other gatherees. It's the performances she's come for, and her tired eyes sparkle at the mention of her favourite poets and songwriters - Waddie Mitchell, Ian Tyson, Don Edwards and the close-harmony trio Sons of the San Joaquin.

"Such deep, mellow voices," she whispers reverentially, "and they yodel just beautifully."Randy Rieman stands ramrod-straight, a lone figure on stage for the opening address of the Gathering, his hat and handlebar moustache casting eerie shadows against the painted backdrop of starry skies and red mountains. Donna is a shy, homely office worker in her late forties from Winnipeg in Canada, on her first visit to the Gathering "I've been saving a long time," she confides. It has taken her just under three days to get here, changing Greyhound coaches a bone-numbing six times. He was late booking next year's room at the coveted Stockmen's Hotel and now he's 15th on the waiting list. "My friends say I'm crazy to drive all this way for poetry, but they don't know how much fun it is."No one makes the pilgrimage to Elko lightly, 500 miles from Las Vegas in the freezing high desert; people are here because they want to be. "The first year I had to stay in Battle Mountain, 72 miles away." Bill, a rancher and one-time rodeo-rider from California, is curs-ing himself.

``You have to plan a year in advance," explains Steve, a young Bronx-born cowpoke who has just made the 15-hour drive down from Oregon. Put it this way: if it's got a machine in it, I ain't too interested.'' But interested enough to pick up new poems in the old way: swapped in bars and bunkhouses, snipped from agricultural calendars and magazines, or culled from the Poem of the Month column in the Western Horseman, where Wallace McRae's comic classic, ``Reincarnation'', first saw the light of day in 1980:The box and you goes in a hole,That's been dug into the ground.Reincarnation starts in whenYore planted neath the moundThe red neon of Elko blinks a cheery greeting: poets welcome to cowboy country - but there's no room at the inn Every bed in town is taken. Doug Mefford is a gravelly voiced old mule-packer, "kind of a driftin' soul", who can sometimes be persuaded to declaim the ballads of Robert Service ("You know what it's like in the Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below;/When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow...'') Why write when you can recite, says Doug "You don't have to hurry It's all written and ready to go. "People try and make us believe we want something we don't want," says Tom, a portly Nevadan in poncho and shades, "but all anyone in the world wants is to look after their family, sing their songs, write their poems and mind their own business."Or recite the old favourites. Instead, he unleashed a cultural tornado which whipped through the hearts and minds of ranchers across the West.Cowboys came out of the sagebrush from every direction. Here were folk who dressed like them, thought like them and loved the same poems: poems about livestock and wide open spaces, poems that served as models they'd like to live by, poems they could listen to in the company of others who know that it's all right to cry at the birth of a foal or the death of a favourite dog. After months on the road and 1,500 letters to small-town news-papers, Cannon rounded up 28 poets and reciters who came together in Elko one winter's day in 1985 in what he planned as a one-shot attempt to arrest the decline of ballad recitation.