He’s a poet, a ranch hand, a musician, an essayist, a family man, and a philosopher. He enjoys physical labor and exercise, solitude, and the infectious energy of a big party. He’s multi-lingual and has lived all over the American West and abroad. He is Wyoming’s Poet Laureate and a member of the band, the Fireants, which played at the Wyoming Wilderness Ball in October.

“I guess if you were being critical, you could say I am a dilettante,” David Romveldt says. “I see something new and say, gee, I’d like to try that.

“All these labels and titles are part of the whole that makes up me as a person,” he continues. “But I think you’ll see that issues of music and language have been steady throughout my life.”

Romveldt, who lives in Buffalo, Wyoming with his wife and daughter, sees being named Poet Laureate of Wyoming by Gov. Freudenthal as a kind of vindication of his work. He’s lived in the state since 1988, but he’s never really felt fully accepted. For one thing, he doesn’t write cowboy poetry. For another, he was born elsewhere.

Late at Night

After long days riding,
moving sheep from Four Mile
to the mountains, Margo’s
grandfather comes home,
enters his darkened house.
Negotiating the turns
from memory, he finds
a box of matches,
strikes one. The blue tip
flames, illuminating
the room, thickly
shadowed, an old man’s
face. He seems to wait
then looks up, grins,
“Of course,” as if
remembering an important
event far away.” Of
course,” he repeats,
pulling the string
that hangs in front
of him. “Electricity,
I forget about
electricity.”

From How Many Horses, 1988, Ion Books

“Being named Poet Laureate felt very big,” he says. “It marks a recognition of my work in a realm where it is not really appreciated. It gives me the sense that I am part of this place.

“Old timers really aren’t convinced outsiders belong here,” Romveldt continues. “I’m lucky I married into a family with roots in Wyoming, the old timers cut me some slack, but they still hesitate to accept me.

“Writing someone off because they aren’t from here is an easy way to discount people without actually considering the issues. You can just say, ‘Oh the people that made that decision are no good, so their argument is irrelevant,’” he adds.

While Romveldt can rationalize the inequity of this kind of xenophobia, he still says he wants to fit in. In an essay he wrote for Sun magazine, he writes, “I’d gotten into an argument about environmental politics with a Wyoming native who felt that my view could only have been held by a non-Westerner. When I defended my westerness by saying that I was born in Portland, Oregon, I was told, “There you have it.’

“Part of me wanted to insist that Portland was in the West,” he continues. “Why did I care so much whether people in Wyoming or Montana saw me as a Westerner? Because I wanted to belong.”

Like many writers and poets, Romveldt’s work is informed and influenced by his surroundings. This intimacy and sense of place makes him feel he belongs here—that he knows Wyoming. Hence his frustration with the outsider label that can still rile him up. Ironically, in his opinion, much of the writing that is deemed ‘uniquely Wyoming’ is less about what the state is really like than about the image it seeks to convey.

“Many people outside Wyoming treat the place as a mythical landscape, a romantic image, more than a real place,” Romveldt says. “They expect the writing from Wyoming will be place and landscape centered.”

Romveldt’s link to the land and its people runs throughout his work but his writing is not necessarily about cowboys, rodeos, cattle, and the romantic image of the American West typically associated with Wyoming writing. He says the “gritty, demanding daily chores” he does as a hired hand on his father-in-law’s ranch “can, paradoxically, be transcendent” because of their intimacy with place, with animals, and with his companions and his writing reflects this transcendence in a way that is uniquely his own.

But Wyoming—its land, animals and people—is changing. Romveldt says he sees it in his own backyard where there are more people in the mountains and more energy development on the plains. But he is hesitant to say the new Wyoming is any less Wyoming than it has ever been. In his mind, there is no static time when the West was more authentic than it is at the present.

“I can’t say to what degree change is more dramatic now than in the past,” Romveldt says. “Imagine the period in which the Europeans came into the northern Rockies and the Great Plains and the way of life that people knew was completely changed. Destroyed? Altered? Transformed? Whatever you call it, everything that people knew of life ceased to exist.

“These changes were so dramatic and so excruciating for the peoples of the West that it’s hard for me to believe the changes we’re seeing are greater. By saying this, I don’t want to diminish what is happening now. The issue of water in the intermountain west means that everything we take for granted will have to change. And we know to what degree mineral exploitation alters our physical landscape and our sense of ourselves.” Romveldt’s status as Wyoming Poet Laureate has given him new name recognition in the state, but he is perhaps more well known for his music. His band, the Fireants plays what they call “dance music of the Americas.” It’s a foot-stomping mix of Latin rhythms and Cajun beats spiced up with a polka here and a salsa there.

The band also has a social conscious. Each band member is allowed one “gimme” —an event where they play for free to support a specific cause—per year. The Wyoming Wilderness Ball was not a gimme, but the band did play for less than normal.

“Playing for a slightly reduced fee or paying for our own rooms and expenses are ways we try to help while recognizing that we need to earn a living,” Romveldt says. “We’re honored to play for the Wyoming Outdoor Council and in general for this kind of event. And while I can’t speak for the band, as an individual I often wish that I could always play for no charge.”