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TO BE A POET READING: "To be a poet reading is chancy work at best," says Ric Masten, "Tough enough to face rejection, but worse, far worse, this:" --and in a high panicked voice he cries, "You fell asleep! Even as I read you closed your eyes and dropped your head upon your chest. And to this day I marvel that you kept your seat, nodding east and west." Masten goes on in this poem to drolly dissect his devastation, and then ends in trademark fashion, by reversing his perspective: "Only now, writing this years later, have I thought to ask about the dream you might have had that day, and all I may have missed." This is vintage Ric Masten, who, over the last three decades, has honed a unique style of poetics and performance. His formula, if it can be called that, is deceptively simple. He bares his "gimpy soul" grappling with the big and not so big questions of life, unashamedly going for the laughs along the way, and then serves up punchlines which elicit not guffaws but understanding. It is a style which has evolved as much on stage as at the typewriter; until recently Masten spent more time on tour than at his California home, and gave an average of three hundred readings a year. Armed with his leather satchel full of poems, his animated voice, and, on occasion, his twelve-string guitar, Masten has criss-crossed the continent since 1968 to bring his poetry to the public. He has performed in colleges and kindergartens, civic clubs and mental hospitals, churches and penitentiaries. As a result, he has reached many people who would normally consider a 90-minute poetry reading to be cruel and unusual punishment. In his sixties now, Masten belongs unreservedly to the oral tradition of storytellers, folksingers, and other performing artists. He feels he has more in common with medieval troubadours than with most contemporary poets, and he may be right. Masten is an anachronism, a modern-day minstrel who thrives off live, personal exchange in an age of electronic mass communication. He has appeared on television and radio; in fact, throughout the 1980s he had a regular spot on a KOA radio talk show in Denver, calling in every Friday afternoon to infuse their discussion with a topical poem. Nevertheless, Masten's bread and butter has been his live performances, and he feels the oral tradition cannot be sold to a mass market. "I can stand up in front of a Kiwanis Club, a feminist group, a high school assembly and put together something eighty percent of them will enjoy," he says. "Part of the trick is that I'm a live human being standing there, in a sense, reading my journal out loud. And when I talk about almost committing suicide, about my prejudices, about the way I treat my kids, I'm live -- talking to people live. It creates a human moment, something not possible on television." Who is Ric Masten? What is behind his rumpled guise? Where do his fears and anxieties come from? The poems in this volume can probably answer these questions better than any biographical sketch. But, like all artists, Masten has moved across a particular historical landscape and has worked within a certain cultural milieu. An awareness of this context can contribute to a deeper understanding of his poetry. Masten was born in Carmel, California, on June 20, 1929. His father, Richard T. Masten, owned and edited the Carmel Pinecone newspaper, wrote plays and published one historical novel. He died at age 49, when Ric was twelve years old. Ric and his younger brother and sister were raised by their mother, Hildreth, and stepfather, Dr. Chester Hare, an optometrist in Monterey California. Ric was very fond of his stand in father but always perceived his mother as both neglectful and domineering. Packed off to boarding school against his will as an adolescent, Ric retaliated by going on to flunk out of five colleges. His failures were not just due to obstinacy or lack of intelligence, though tests showed he had a substandard IQ of 106. Much later Masten "I still have a special place in my heart for the so-called dum-dums," says Masten, "because that's what I was. Sometimes when I go into a high school or college to speak, they apologize because they couldn't find a high level poetry class, but have a few basic-skills classes for me to do, inside I cheer because those are the people who can hear me best, who won't sit there analyzing themselves out of an experience." Due to Masten's difficulty in school he never mastered basic grammatical skills. Thus he rarely punctuates his poems, which riles some critics. Masten laughs and defends himself saying he does not punctuate because he doesn't know how; he invites purists to pencil in the commas and periods themselves if it bothers them. The one class Masten always passed was art. He had studied oil painting seriously as a boy and had been accepted at age nineteen as the youngest member of the Carmel Art Association. As a last resort, Masten's mother sent him to Paris in 1947 to study for two years at the Institute des Beaux Arts and with famed cubist Fernend Leger. Masten was a reluctant expatriate. He tried his best to be miserable and after two years abroad put his brushes aside. Only recently has he resumed painting (with impressive results) at his daughter's request for lessons. On returning home from Europe, Masten teamed up with three friends and began writing and producing musical comedies at Carmel's Forest Theatre. They were doing well, with five local productions to their credit, when his mother got involved. Masten abruptly retired from the theatre. He discovered what his mother hated most -- rock 'n' roll -- and pursued it with a vengeance, trying desperately to break into the record business in Los Angeles. By then he had already met his future wife, aspiring actress Billie Barbara Bolton. "She tried out for the lead and didn't make it," Masten used to say. "I had to do something for her so I married her." It is the kind of flip, chauvinist remark he can no longer get away with after almost forty six years of marriage that produced four children and much feminist verse. A poet in her own right, Billie Barbara is the author of Owning the Beast and the Bad Girl (1970) and Billie Beethoven (1976). In the mid-seventies, with their marriage on the rocks, she and Ric collaborated on His and Hers; A Voyage Through the Middle-Age Crazies (1978). They started touring together then, and they still share the stage occasionally. In the beginning, however, Masten supported his young family by working in construction and then as a printer in a small job shop in Monterey, Meanwhile, he moonlighted as a song writer and record producer winding up working for Warner Brothers Records. Ninty-two of his songs were recorded and released over a ten year period. Among them were such forgettable hits as "Rockabilly Blues," "Teen-Age Creature," and "Baby, Baby, Baby, You're a Thinkin' Man's Girl." "When you work in Hollywood, you ride the trends," says Masten unapologetically. Masten managed the two careers by neglecting his family, an arrangement that could not last. While Billie Barbara pleaded with her husband to stay at home more, Warner Brothers pressured him to move to Los Angeles. In 1963, feeling that his marriage was becoming as empty as his success, Masten quit his jobs and ran off with his family to Big Sur "to do a kind of hippy thing in the bushes with a bone around my neck." With the help of a small inheritance he built a house sixteen miles south of Carmel on a ridge above the Palo Colorado Canyon. He did the carpentry himself, erecting a tower for the master bedroom and redwood decks to take advantage of the ocean views. He shingled his retreat and surrounded it with a terraced vegetable garden. On his mountain top, Masten raised goats and chickens and began writing poetry. "I didn't really think I was going to make a living out of it. I just needed to do it, to do this, " he says, motioning toward his garden. To make ends meet, Masten went to work for his father-in-law as a cement finisher. But he was anxious to support his family solely through his writing, and he asked his first art teacher, Richard Lofton of Carmel, how he marketed his work. "I'll never forget his answer," says Masten. "He said 'That's not your business, You Masten did share his work, and one of the best friends it made was the Unitarian Universalist Church. Its congregations liked his Humanistic approach to religion and the folk and protest songs he was writing at the time. A minister got him involved in a lecture program, and in 1968 invited Masten to address the denominations General Assembly in Cleveland. The national church sponsored his tours for the next three years and underwrote six more years. The Unitarians also put out eleven LP records of Masten's songs and two albums of his poetry readings. He began producing his own books of poetry at this time through his basement publishing company, Sunflower Ink (now SunInk Publications). Ten all together. In 1977, Beacon Press published Speaking Poems, a major selection of Masten's work. In 1990 Papier-Mache Press brought out retrospective collectioin called Ric Masten Speaking, it is now in it 3rd edition. Masten believes that the church has an obligation to support people in the arts, "the wine and bread makers who need no more than an audience and a salary." "If it hadn't been for the Catholics," he points out, "we'd of never had Michelangelo." Mastens relationship with the Unitarian Universalists culminated in 1973 when he was ordained a minister, the first in the church who never graduated from either college or seminary. Despite his disastrous career as a student, Masten has performed at more than 400 colleges in 48 states, Canada and England. He has been poet-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh, the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and at Proctor Academy in Andover, New Hampshire. Most recently, Masten has lectured at Harvard University's Principal Center and at the National Education Association's Mastery in Learning Project in Washington, D.C., where he is invariably introduced as "one of our failures." Although active on college campuses, Masten is rarely hired by English Departments. Usually he performs for Speech Communication, Psychology, Counseling or Education classes. He has even addressed Electrical Engineering and Chemistry students, where he talks about the language barrier between poets and scientists. Unfortunately, he does not often get the chance to discuss the barriers between himself and English professors, many of whom dismiss his work as vaudeville or too near the level of talk. Masten has been stung by this rejection, but he is philosophical about it. "Maybe I'm not a poet in the strict sense of the word," he reasons, "especially if you involve the printing press in the mix, because I guess my being present at the reading, speaking my work to a live audience, is part of what I am. Maybe I am a minister. The word minister and minstrel come from the same root word meaning servant. And I believe a poet is a servant who helps us see things more clearly, who helps us recognize what we already know, who serves the human hive as a spokesperson, which in the end makes me a poet after all." Masten's poems are without a doubt enlivened by his compelling presence and inimitable delivery, but they are not dependent on them. Misunderstanding this fact has led him to mistrust the title of poet and to adopt a string of qualifying adjectives. Over the years he has identified himself as a "speaking poet" "road poet" and "stand-up poet" "Someone who makes poetic observations." These are honest attempts to distinguish himself from his more Masten's background is not in English literature or the classics; it is in fine art, musical comedy, rock 'n' roll, and religious liberalism. His poetry reflects his unlikely apprenticeships; it is expressive, entertaining, rousing and humane. Moreover, in sharing his own inner life, Masten has documented how American society has changed over the last quarter century. He has shown how conflicts over race, religion, woman's liberation, alcohol abuse, and other national public issues have impacted the most intimate personal relationships. His primary aim has always been to dissolve the barriers to communication. A difficult task, but he has worked at it tirelessly, with pathos and wit. Pain and laughter. That may seem an odd combination in poetry, but Masten's contrapuntal style makes it work. Besides, he worries about poets who take themselves too seriously, take life too seriously, and go under. "Go through Anne Sexton and count the laughs," he advises, "There arn't many." Masten speaks as an artist who has been to the edge himself. In 1971 he "almost bought the hard-rocky mattress, the super-sleeper" below the Bixby Creek Bridge in Big Sur. Instead he came back from the jumping-off place and put it down, not as his brush with suicide but as a birthday poem. "I would hope," says Masten, "that people could read my poetry and see that I am sensitive enough to know how bad it can feel out there in the real world. I've been cut and hurt, but recently I have come to the conclusion that I would like to not only prove to you with my work that I am familiar with the dark side of the paradox, but, by the length of my life, that I was able to handle it."
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learned that he suffered from dyslexia and a severe hearing impairment, but in his youth he was convinced that he was stupid. Good at athletics he spurned academic knowledge and wore his dunce cap proudly.
create. The moment you start thinking "market" you ruin your art. You create what you have to for yourself, and you share it with everybody in your life. If you have anything to say, your work will make friends and the friends of your work will see that it's seen, read or heard.'"
literary, stage-shy colleagues. But in the end the modifiers sound disingenuous and defensive. He does not need them; he is a poet, irregardless of popular appeal or academic rebuffs.