Foreword
In the central section of this book you watch two separate voices ponder, protest, and celebrate the difficulties of female-male relationships. Ric faces you on the left, Billie Barbara on the right: you have the minister's eye view of the expectant man and woman. The dialogue is not perfectly synchronized. Ric's may be off in the clouds, or in Cleveland, while Billie Barbara is digging under the house or discovering herself through art. But more often than not the left and right-hand pages do speak to each other, or at least past each other to us. And that they often speak out of sync is an important part of what we hear.
The dialogue is continuous, kaleidoscopic, the divergence signaled by one type face for Ric and a different one for Billie Barbara. At two points the criss-crossing, independent voices merge, in the Annual Relationship Renewal Contract (1972) and the warty frog poem that ends the central section. Here there is unity, for the moment; but contract and poem were written by them jointly, and the type face itself declares this neutrality.
My few words here are also set in this third, neutral type face. Well I suppose I'm "neutral." but I am also thoroughly engaged. I'm here to represent the network of close friends the Mastens have developed throughout the country, particularly those amateur booking agents who create their yearly tours by lining up work: the more appearances we schedule, the longer we'll have Ric and Billie Barbara in our town, complicating and enlivening us and our friends. This is now the tenth year Ric's been on the road. It's the fourth for Billie Barbara. And so I and others have spent half a generation now watching them surge back and forth across the land, caught up in the foam of their surf. They've put themselves on display for us, acting out with art and emotion and humor and incredible energy the remarkable range of marital possibilities.
For a number of years it was Ric, solo. Each year he'd arrive for his week in Pittsburgh (or Kansas City, or Atlanta), staging the agonies and insights of the previous year for the frightening variety of audiences his ego demanded. ("But have you ever played a prison," he said recently to a poet friend; "how about a mental institution!") Each year I'd match up some of the vibrations in my own life with those Ric unpacked for us all with such clarity and insistence.
Billie Barbara was there too, of course, but unseen, the sea anchor to windward out on the mountain in California. And then came the year Ric was putting himself through one of the stormiest passages, the affair with a young admirer. Again, for many of us there were reverberations in our own lives, whether actual or fantasy. It wasn't really a surprise that Billie Barbara finally appeared in person the following year, trying out the water here in Pittsburgh, a particularly warm and receptive lake. There was a real edge to the Mastens' poems and songs that year, as Ric and Billie Barbara continued working furiously on overhauling their relationship, right there in our classrooms, churches, and kitchens.
So the Rorshach of the Masten art took on a new depth and variety, a whole new set of relevancies to our own lives. The next year Billie Barbara went on the road full-time with Ric, and the backwash in church and community groups was full of froth and foam. There isn't anyone in our culture who's uninterested in the birth/death and care/feeding of that perpetual invalid marriage. I knew that forcefully enough from my own life, but also because I found myself producing a record called "after the sunset again" the Masten marriage material as it stood in 1973. Following them around greater Pittsburgh, recording the talk-backs to use in the liner notes, I was struck by the dynamics of the response they provoked. That year we all suffered through our own divorces (fantasy, real, or symbolic) along with the Mastens.
Has it kept its edge? In some ways it's evened out, found more notes of celebration. But I think it still has its verve, its excitement, and I know from personal experience that it still packs a wallop, either in performance or on the page.
When they suggested I write the Preface for this latest incarnation of the marriage material, now far richer and more diverse and fertilized with the feedback of thousands of us over the years, my response was to wonder whether their marriage could weather the strain of putting the book together. Nothing's easy about joint authorship, about trying to achieve parity, especially when Ric had a substantial head start. It seems to me that they have managed to make the book balance. Female balances male, of course, and Billie Barbara's poetry has its own characteristic images and power that balance Ric's marvelous narrative line and insight.
Every time this ever-changing material is "caught" for a moment on plastic or paper, it achieves a false permanence. The plastic and paper may lie there unchanging, but the process that material lives, goes pulsating on: in the performance, where every new audience feeds in its response and alters the experience for the next audience; in the Masten's own relationship, which keeps struggling and tugging at its seams; and in our own lives, as our new perspectives recreate the poems and songs for us every time we experience them.
Chris Rawson
Pittsburgh, Nov. 1975 |
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