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.

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A Bus, Not a Bike, a Burro, a Boat, or a Blazer

            Had Masten written these words as prose (“My God!  It just occurred to me: underneath our clothes, everyone on this bus is stark naked!”) they would have retained a great deal of their power to transport the reader, for his diction and syntax are well chosen and his theme is striking.  But Masten elected to arrange this text as a poem, and it is in the uniquely poetic techniques of his work that we recognize the innovative quality of its language. In the present analysis, we will focus on two uniquely poetic techniques employed in the text: 1) its isolated brevity and 2) its arrangement in lines.

            A third technique that is more common in poetry than prose (and that is characteristic of most of Ric Masten’s poetry) is the absence of upper case letters and punctuation. While this technique enhances the theme and effect of “On This Bus”, it is not a technique chosen by the author for this poem in particular.  It would be more appropriately addressed in an aesthetic analysis of Masten’s oeuvre.

            As a prose text, these words could not stand alone.  They would demand context and connections, a place in a plot or a character’s development.  As poetry, however, their simple, direct, clarity focuses on a single moment of perception, a moment that does not need a larger context because, as a poem, its context is the human experience.  The clarity of the moment presented here in its own stark intensity and precision calls to mind the works of the imagist poets at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Like their work, it avoids explanation or elaboration, didacticism or moralizing. As in their work, one cannot find a single word to remove.  It is pure simplicity.  Like many imagists’ works, Masten’s small masterpiece reads like a haiku and lingers like the best haiku shimmering in the reader’s consciousness long after its page is turned.  The imagist-like condensation of something enormous into a single, unadorned moment of clarity is, perhaps, this text’s most essential use of poetic form.

            There is one more important element of the poem’s isolation, a device that both reinforces the self-contained nature of the text and gives the reader a critical beginning point for reading and interpreting it.  It is the title.  When an author gives a title to his/her work, the reader may assume that an important clue has been given.  “On This Bus” (not On a Bus, not On the Bus, On That, Some, Any, My... Bus) invites the reader to stand (or sit if there’s a seat available) on this bus alongside the speaker, to ride with her or him.  With this title, Masten invites the reader to ride with him where anyone can ride, where we are all on the way somewhere, where we hope to settle in and just ride.

            While its spare condensation of language may be the essential foundation of this text’s artistry, Masten’s arrangement of that spare language in lines on the page not only cues the reader to read this text as poetry, it also  sharpens and defines the poem’s effect from beginning to end.  The title functions like the name of the bus route we have chosen, establishing expectations, inviting a settling in, focusing our attention on a destination not a present moment.

            And then, someone cries out: “my god”. 

            Our mental brakes screech, and we are jolted awake.

            From Jesus’ allusive words of despair in the Gospel of Matthew (“My God, my God!  Why hast thou forsaken me?”) to the last time a reader heard someone express a moment of personal frustration or surprise, the simple phrase “my god” connotes something important.  Something beyond ordinary expectations. 

            That popular contemporary parlance employs the condensed expressions “ohmigod” and “OMG” demonstrates the extensive use of a very similar phrase and also the need for a verbal distinction between serious and more casual usage. Though these recent verbal mollifiers (“ohmigod” and “OMG”) were not available to Masten in 1979, the development of these new expressions illustrates the distinction the poet accomplishes by choosing “my god” instead of “oh my god”. By starting with these two words on a single short poetic line, Masten simultaneously alerts the reader to the significance of what is to follow on this (poetry) bus and puts the reader alongside the familiar, informal vernacular of bus stops and sidewalks and going to school and work and everyday life and people.

            If the poem’s first line invites the reader to respond with some urgency - what?  what is it? - the second line dials back the intensity.  By placing the whole clause on the next line (Imagine placing a line break after any other word.  It would take the reader in a different direction.), Masten makes the speaker’s experience more ordinary: something “just occurred to me”.  The contrast between the urgent opening line and the “no big deal” sense of the second puts the reader in limbo.

            The contrast in these lines, established by their length as well as the contrasting urgency of their familiar usage, is enhanced by the author’s following the jolting burst of “my god” with the soothing iambic trimeter of line 2.  And then, like a typical bus ride, the poem follows a line of easy rhythm with another one word stop: “underneath”.

            By isolating “underneath” on a line of its own, Masten invites the reader to experience one of those artful ambiguities of poetry.  Is “underneath” an adverb clarifying where “it” occurred to the speaker?  Does it imply an inner occurrence (underneath the surface reality) or a physical observation (underneath some object)?  Or is it suggesting something undercover or hidden?  The poetic answer is, of course, yes.  Isolating the single word on a line of its own stops the reader before she or he can get comfortable in a seat on this bus, and it allows several connotative passengers to board.

            As it turns out, “underneath” is not an adverb after all; it’s a preposition.  And who could have guessed its object? “our clothes”? Again the bus reader stops and wonders, this time, perhaps, with an even more jolting image. Whatever has occurred to the speaker we are riding with is not going to be normal.

            As always, a short line invites close attention to diction, bringing the reader up short as if to see who’s getting on the bus at this stop.  With a longer line, the reader might not have slowed enough to notice that the speaker is talking about her/his own clothes as well as those of all the other passengers.  Including us.  He/she first separates from the rest of us - “my god” ... “to me” - and then joins us together “our clothes”.  The movement is the middle step that moves with broadening inclusion from me, to us, to everyone in the next line.  And it insures that both the speaker and the reader are included in “everyone”. 

            The gentle three beat pattern of the second line is repeated in “everyone on this bus” in line 5.  Again the reader is lulled into the mundane music of the wheels going round and round and people going up and down and on and on. This arrangement reproduces the stop and start pattern of a bus ride. It strengthens and emphasizes the notion that the speaker’s realization does not exclude the driver or the grandmother grasping her groceries or the twitchy gang banger or the meek little man with rimless glasses reading a slim volume of poetry or the nurse or the speaker herself/himself.

            By making the next phrase the title of the poem, Masten clearly draws the reader’s attention to it.  It has the effect of a repeated line and begs the question:  what bus is this we are all riding?  Because we have learned to read poetry as figurative and, as Terry Eagleton observes, fictional, we are more likely to imagine that “this bus” has a capacity that exceeds the number of passengers on the last city or school bus we rode.  If so, what is the nature of the bus Ric Masten has given us tickets to ride?                       

            Like the first line, the last line has only two strongly accented beats.  It is, therefore, more likely to confront readers rather than comfort them.  The starkness of the consonants in the word “stark” are jolting, and the repetition of the hard “k” sounds in two consecutive words curtly cuts one’s consciousness.  This poetry bus we have been riding comes to its destination too soon, and we discover that we have arrived - my god - naked.   

            Bam!  Oh how unseemly!  How embarrassing!  Uncouth!

            By his arrangement of its words in lines, the poet not only signals the reader  to read this text as poetry, he deepens the meaning of its everyday language and the everyday experience he presents.  He jolts the reader back and forth, demanding by various contrasts of length and sound attention to the connectedness that underlies the separation of the lines themselves. That is, it seems, an especially appropriate use of form to support the poem’s theme or content, for one of the strong claims of “On This Bus” is the realization that the bus rider’s unexamined assumption (i.e. the otherness of everyone on this bus) is questionable.   

            By choosing to invite the reader to approach this text as a poem, the author, in the way of imagism, insists that she/he look at a precise moment not in the context of a plot or a character but in the context of human life itself.  With his title, Masten invites special attention to a single phrase of the poem, and, as Terry Eagleton would have it, the fictional nature of poetry itself.  “On This Bus”, because it is a poem, is not a factual account of someone’s thoughts while riding a particular bus; it is, rather, the poet’s observation about meaning and life, about the human condition, captured in a poem that shares a particular moment (real or imagined, it does not matter).   Masten himself writes elsewhere that writing poetry is “putting a corral of words around the stuff that’s in our gut and heart”  in moments we can all experience. (Even As We Speak. Carmel, CA: Sunflower Ink, 1982 p.102)  The title and the phrase, invite the reader  to take a seat on this bus and to ask, what does this bus have to do with me?  Am I on this same bus?  Are we all - everyone! - on this bus?

            By writing these words as poetry, Masten emphatically answers, “Yes.”

NOTES:

1.   An analysis of any kind is strengthened by making an argument

            rather than engaging in mere description.

2.   The skill of aesthetic analysis requires at least three foundational assumptions:

a.   The recognition of an author’s purposeful choices

                        and the imagination of possibilities that were not chosen.

b.   The understanding of elements of literary form.

                        e.g.  allusion, diction, effect, enjambment, figurative, literal, meter, poetry,                                     prose, syntax, text, theme

c.   The awareness of the author’s interpretive community.

                        (cf. Fish: “Is There a Text...?”)

3.     It is possible to do aesthetic analysis without knowledge of additional information    (except the foundational information assumed) to be found “beyond the page”,        but the more information a reader/analyst has at hand, the more authority her/his        analysis will have.  (e.g. author, date of publication, sources of possible allusions,     literary history (haiku, imagism), Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem)  In addition, it

            is always useful to employ the word oeuvre if possible.

QUESTIONS:

1.   Must aesthetic analysis be an analysis of form alone and not content?

            What is the aesthetic relationship between the two?

2.   Must aesthetic analysis assume that an author consciously, rationally, purposefully

            made all of the choices the analysis identifies?

            How else might the analyst’s conclusions be legitimately justified?

3.   What is it possible to know about an author’s intent?

            How does such knowledge affect the practice of responding to literature?

            What knowledge of the author’s intent does this aesthetic analysis employ?

4.  What is the effect of giving this analysis a title ("Riding the Poetry Bus") rather than calling it “An Aesthetic Analysis of ‘On This Bus’ by Ric Masten”?