Personal Essay: Response to "On this bus"

Dancing Naked on the Bus: Ya Gotta Love It

            I love it when Ric Masten socks me and every other reader right in the kisser with the notion that we are all stark naked.  Period.  Well, not exactly -- he doesn’t use periods.  Or capital letters or sesquipedalianisms.   “That’s all?” we ask,  “That’s the whole poem?”  It leaves us hanging, makes us want to cover ourselves, makes us want to hear it again.  Maybe next time we’ll get some insight to cover ourselves with.  Not to mention the underdressed poet!

            But that’s all there is: we’re all on the same bus; we’re all naked. There’s really no dressing that up.  And that stark and naked simplicity and directness, that short and not so sweet abruptness, are the genius of Ric Masten’s poetry.  He puts us into a moment and leaves us standing there chuckling or puzzling or ...  Or something.  He demands a response.  He leads us into some innocuous occurrence and drops us there to fend for ourselves, to see what he is seeing or saying. Or not.  No one can say, “I don’t understand it.”  No one can claim, “I don’t know what that means.”  The only questions that can be asked are things like:  Is that all there is?  Why did he write that?  What makes that a poem?

            I love that.

To read the rest of this essay, click the "read more" link below!

The most important thing for you to learn in school

One of the most important things you can learn in school is to get in the habit of asking the question:  As opposed to what?

To judge the value of an argument or the significance of an act (including the actions of artists as evidenced in their texts), it helps if you understand what the alternatives are.

What other choices might the actor/writer/artist/character have made?  How would those choices alter the results?  What choices did other people make in similar circumstances?  What makes this text or argument different from others?

Ideological Analysis of "On This Bus"

RIDING NAKED ON RIC MASTEN’S BUS

by Jim Benton

            A lifetime of Ric Masten’s ideas and ideals are detectable in a single poem he wrote roughly halfway through his life in 1969.  “On This Bus” demonstrates his persistent attention to the overlooked and undervalued people of the world and his affirmation that we all share the same life struggles.  The poem expresses his willingness and ability to put himself and his readers into moments of insight and vulnerability without explanation or justification. And, finally, the brief text shows Masten’s unfailing refusal to be sentimental or saccharin or to offer simplistic solutions or facile observations about the lives we live on this bus we ride.

To read the rest of this essay, click on the "Read more" link below.

An Aesthetic Analysis of "On This Bus"

RIDING THE POETRY BUS

by Jim Benton

            In his brief poem (6 lines; 17 words) “On This Bus”, Ric Masten uses the most commonplace diction and conversational syntax to raise the reader’s awareness of the potential significance of the mundane and to show the reader the way poets see the world. Through his artful application of poetic technique, wedding form and content with deceptive simplicity, Masten fulfills the poet’s promise that, by reading these words as poetry, the reader will be rewarded with more than the recounting of some isolated event, more than the literal words-on-the-page meaning, and more than seventeen words’ worth of wisdom.

To read the rest of the analysis click on the "Read More" link on the next line.

A Summary of "On this bus"

In a six-line poem of free verse by Ric Masten, the speaker, riding on a bus, reports his/her sudden realization that all its passengers are equally naked beneath their clothes.

--Jim Benton

To read author's notes about this summary and some relevant discussion questions, click on the "Read More" link below.

Five Ways to Respond to Literature

How you respond to a text depends on how you look at a text

If you see a text as . . .	you might respond to it with . . .	that answers the question . . .
a source of information	a summary	what does it say?
a work of art	an aesthetic analysis	why does it please/entertain/move readers?
an act of persuasion	an ideological analysis	what values does it affirm and challenge?
an observation about life	a personal essay	how can I relate this to my own life?
a model	a similar text	can I write something like that?

Definitions

Aesthetics. Theory of the taste and the perception of the beautiful in nature and art.
Ideology. A scheme of ideas (about what is moral, normal rational, just, beautiful, etc.), especially one that is held implicitly.
Implicit.  Implied, inferred; Not stated openly or directly.

Is the meaning of a poem entirely up to the reader?

Terry Eagleton:  ". . . a poem does not come complete with a ready-made context for making sense of its words.  Instead, we have to bring such a context to it, and there is always a repertoire of different possibilities here. This is not to say that poems can mean just anything you like. 'And justify the ways of God to men' cannot mean 'And fix my puncture with some chewing gum,' (see image at left) at least not as the English language is presently constituted." (How to Read a Poem, 32)