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.

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            I want to ask those questions about every poem.  And I have been replaying that six-line scene on the bus in the poetry highlight reels of my brain for -- my god -- over twenty years and asking them again and again. It may be the only complete poem I can recite from memory.

            I am an inveterate critic of elitism and, alas, something of a closet elitist.  I love it when I see pictures of Ric Masten wearing Salvation Army used clothes and looking all disheveled.  And uncool.  I love it when I read about his broken down old cars and his broken down old body.  I drive a new Honda Civic and wouldn’t be caught dead in a twenty-year-old flowery wide-collared shirt with the top three buttons missing.  I work out at the neighborhood Y.  And, to my shame, I must confess: I would do anything to stay away from Wal-Mart on a busy Saturday morning and, still worse, I don’t exactly feel comfortable riding a city bus.

            But wait.  Before we go any farther, I have to say this.  I met Ric Masten once, spent an afternoon with him and some kindred spirits maybe twenty-five years ago.  He played his guitar and sang and read some poetry, but mostly we talked.  Five or six of us.  All afternoon.  It’s not much of a connection, but, because of it and because this is a personal essay, I am going to call him Ric.  There.  I’ve said it.  I know people who know him well enough to call him Ric, and when I’m not being all literary and stuff, it’s how I think of him.  I hate saying this, but, “It’s what Ric would have wanted.”

            Despite his humble, proletarian lifestyle, Ric recognized closet elitism even in himself.  Before he contracted the prostate cancer that ended his life in 2008, he confessed to having another life-threatening disease: “terminal cool.”  (Now, I am about to quote from the first line of one of his poems at the beginning of my own sentence.  Do I capitalize the first word or not?  He didn’t.  He didn’t even capitalize the first person singular pronoun!  Nominative case.  Ric didn’t graduate college, wasn’t a good student in high school either.  He was dyslexic.  Introducing him to a group of English teachers once, G. Lynn Nelson called him “one of our failures.” (Even As We Speak, p. 100)   He couldn’t even spell his own name!)  Having devised a way to temporarily avoiding my capitalization problem I proceed thus:  Note these lines from “Terminal Cool” (Stark Naked, p. 47):

           

            in the final stages of this cruel affliction

            the diseased are often the last to know

            how disfigured their demeanor has become

            with me

            it was not until my friends started talking through the door

            and wore flu masks

            ...

            not until then

            did i bother to consult a mirror and see the result

            of an unchecked case of skepticism

                        the face

                        once eager and receptive

                        had lost all expression

                        every trace of wonder and delight

                        had sloughed off

                        constant analysis had narrowed the eyes

                        ...

We elitists (closeted or not) often suffer quietly from terminal cool.  We are inclined to avoid public foolishness and spontaneity in ourselves and others.  We prefer analyzing life to enjoying it, explanations to experiences, and decorum to delight.  We always explain that we don’t watch much television. We do not sing.  And we miss out on so much life.

            Ric wrote a song in the 1960s -- “The Dirty Word Song” -- that the closet elitist in me finds entirely too unsophisticated.  And way uncool.  He calls it a children’s song, but that’s no excuse.  Its basic idea is that the words we call dirty, the ones we allow to shock and offend us, are harmless at worst and may well serve a useful function.  One stanza goes: “Wouldn’t it be awful if people didn’t swear, / And when ya bang your finger ya jes’ give a silent prayer. / If suddenly the dirty words all were clean / Would the poetry improve in the men’s latrine? / Dirty words, dirty words, be glad we got ‘em / Real dirty words like ...... bottom!”  And (in other stanzas) “doggy pooh” and “potty” and “pooper”.  (Stark Naked, p. 7)  I hate that cute little ditty on oh so many levels -- apostrophied words like “‘cause” and “‘bout”, and supposed slang like “gonna” and “gotta” and - gag! - “ya”, and those strings of ..................... --  but it speaks the truth.  The last stanza identifies the real dirty words “like hate and war”.  And that’s great, but could ya jes’ find some way t’do what ya do, without cheesy rhyme and ..... doggy pooh?

            I hate that.

            But there’s also this: “The Dirty Word Song” is published in the 1969 section of poems in Stark Naked in ’69 and ’79, the section that seems “awkward and embarrassing” to the author, the ones of which he writes, “I can’t tell you how many times I winced over these songs and poems, appalled, asking myself: “Could I have written this?” (p. 1)  And yet, here’s “The Dirty Word Song”.  When I read it and find it awkward and embarrassing myself, I can see it: the disfigured demeanor, the unchecked skepticism, the absence of wonder and delight.  Terminal Cool.

            I love that.

            Ric popped our elitist bubbles!  He did it not by pointing at us but by standing alongside us and holding up a mirror.  The anti-elitist in me loves that!  And I love it when Ric assaults propriety and decorum and says “the brown word.”  Out loud.  In a poem.  That I can then read.  Out loud.  In class.

            Language, I have always believed, should be judged solely by its effectiveness in communicating what one person wants to communicate.  People don’t  necessarily cuss because they don’t have big enough vocabularies.  The best word in a given situation is not the longest word or the most sophisticated one.  It is the one that works best.

            As in Ric’s poem about being with his good friend whose too young son has died:

            i will be your wailing wall man friend

            lean on me and rail against the insanity

            of life / death

            we have lost one of our sons old soldier

            hold on tight -- hammer your fist -- shout your curses

            shit!

            tell me how it was when you last saw him

            your golden boy

            wild hair flying -- king of his own mountain

            ...                                             (Stark Naked, p. 44)

            I don’t care how big your vocabulary is.  Could there be a better word? 

            People ride buses and pick their noses and eat scrambled eggs and drive clunkers in Ric Masten’s poetry.  And they say shit and yell at their kids and get embarrassed.  And they giggle and grin and dance.  They use the language I hear around me every day, and they are fine with that.

            I love that.

            I love the ways Ric bursts the sacrosanct bubbles of elitists and sophisticates (such as your present author) and pricks the prevailing presumptuousness of certain prudish proponents of propriety.  (I also love alliteration.)  And I love the way he stubbornly refuses both to embrace simplistic solutions and to stop dancing.

            In many circles, Ric is best known for his song, “Let It Be a Dance”.  It is a clear expression of this refusal to, well, get dressed or get off the bus.  Consider these excerpts:

            a child is born the old must die

            a time for joy a time to cry

            take it as it passes by

            and let it be a dance

            the morning star comes out at night

            without the dark there can be no light

            and if nothing’s wrong then nothing’s right

            so let it be a dance

            let the sun shine let it rain

            share the laughter bare the pain

            and round and round we go again

            so let it be a dance

           

            (Ric Masten Speaking. Watsonville, CA: Papier-Mache Press, 1990, p. 137-138)

            Ric repeatedly refuses to deny the darkness and death that accompany our passage through life, and yet he likewise refuses not to experience the light and the delight that travel with us as well.  Ya gotta luv it that his last collection of poems, collected over the last years of his terminal prostrate cancer is titled Going Out Dancing! (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2008)

            I love that.

            Still another expression of that same powerful idea and, if I had to choose, my favorite of all Ric’s poems is “The Great Escape”.  (The Deserted Rooster.  Carmel, CA: Sunflower Ink, 1982, p. 53)  I think of this poem as a recognition that it is fun, on occasion, to imagine jumping off the bus we’re on and running away.  It is fun to dream of a kind of life where everything is roses and sunflowers.

           

            perhaps the good life

                                the full life

            is nothing more

            than every once in a while

            pulling yourself through a hole

                                in the roof

            standing triumphantly

            looking down with a

                              hot damn!

                                    and then around

                                         with an

                                                  oh shit!

            I love that in oh so many ways.

            Reading and responding to “On This Bus” takes me on a ride through the ideas and memories and life and writings of Ric Masten, and I love that.  I love it that the poem starts and ends so abruptly and leaves me wondering what’s next.  I love it that it puts me on a bus with everybody else in the world, including Ric and even those folks I’m not so sure about.  I love it that it strips me naked, revealing the closeted elitism that I much prefer to hide.  I love it that it offends certain precious proprieties with its nakedness and its “my god” and reminds me of lots of other shit Ric throws out there.  I love it that Ric makes life’s bus ride a dance.

            And I love this:

            In a 1977 publication (Speaking Poems. Boston, Beacon Press: 1977, p. 83 and 95) the words to “Let It Be a Dance” include these lines in the third stanza:

                

            let the sun shine let it rain

            share the laughter bear the pain

            and round and round we go again

            so let it be a dance

But in 1990, in Ric Masten Speaking, the line appears this way: “share the laughter bare the pain.” (Italics mine, as they say)  Now I like to think that the 1990 version, appearing as it does after Stark Naked and “On This Bus” is a purposeful improvement that Ric made.  Then again, it may have been what he meant all along because God knows he couldn’t spell.  Then again, it could be a simple typo.  I just don’t know.

            I love that, too.

NOTE:

 I just couldn’t help myself.  And I really did leave some things out.  He wrote a poem about not hesitating to sit on the toilet while his wife was in the bathtub right next to him because she knew how full of crap he was.  He wrote one addressed to Sleep as if she were his mistress and “oh how i hate to leave you in the morning!”  And I haven’t even seen Going Out Dancing! 

                        oh thank god

                        it just occurred to me

                        he could have called it

                        Goin’ Out Dancin’