Gordon Massman - Shocking, intense, vulgar and honest. Dear God: thank you for the physical beauty in the world, etc. and get fucked

Gordon Massman, The Essential Numbers 1991 - 2008, Tarpaulin Sky, 2009.

"Oh good, now, NOW, there is something to talk about -- something that, timid people be damned, will enforce response on multiple fronts. . . . In the same way that there is much to be discussed and discovered -- not to mention felt, as being supreme among the beings -- in the works of artists like Joel Peter-Witkin, Hans Bellmer, Paul Mccarthy, David Hamilton, et al. -- there is a similar immanence in even the very gesture of Mr. Massman's work, despite the anti-disclaimer on the back of the book, which is all the more invitation, right?" —Brandon Shimoda


„Read the poem on the back of Gordon Massman’s The Essential Numbers: 1991-2008:

1715
It is unimportant to me whether anyone reads these poems / or their assessment of them should they, I do not care under / whose name they are published, nor could I care less what / literary critics say about them, praise or condemnation, / nothing could be more vapid than some academic advanc- / ing his career on my efforts or within institutionally accept- / able parameters pushing my reputation this way or that, / most contemporary poetry is shit as is the industry that sur- / rounds it and I want no part of it, if I am harsh so be it, if / I am angry then that is life, if I have hurt my consanguineous / they are co-conspirators in their pain, nothing in this work / bears false witness nor have I broken one commandment, / I am a decent man imbued with a religious spirit and cap- / able of love, I have noticed the world is full of cowards.
Yeah.
I’ve been reading this for a couple weeks now, a few poems at a time, because it is so brutally right there and fucked and ready to fuck your head, it needs the slow imbibe, the good one. Where so much ‘poetry’ can be yadda, these are words saying something hard and loud, and meaning it.
Sampled from 18 years of Massman’s writing, poems all numbered for titles, all to the teeth.
I.e. here is the first full sentence of 1262:
Dear God: thank you for the physical beauty in the world, etc.
and get fucked.
How about these lines from 1316:
…Karen’s tampax, Sheila’s lub-
rication, the exquisite blood orange and yellow pipefish, the
unexpurgated yank through caverns of emptiness, cravings of
Joyce, weird tectonic schisms in the earthplates of stability; my
superinformed assailant confusing me with identification; smash-
ing my dick between fist with jackhammer-aching arm, he hal-
lucinatorily grunted, “fucker, you are me,” then incomprehen-
sibly vaporized the instant my come blew me off its string; pride
terrorizes—I’ve slaved, I confess, for years, homosexually, pain-
fully, grievingly, plumbing swallowing my esteem; the tidal sucks
off a devastation-home. No more: hazel; six feet; gray wreath-
tonsure; straight teeth; cupcake mole, left shoulder; moustache;
olive; one-ninety; deceptively soft spoken; black bush; left lobe
crease; fiftyish; big fingers.
It appears there is more than one Gordon telling it sexually, violently, flagrantly like it is than just the Lish.
These are some unyielding monoliths of spit and tongue.
I think you’ve been given all you need now to go pick this up immediately, though I’ll certainly be sharing more about it very soon, and more sample poems are available on the TSky page.
This is the kind of book you can’t ask for until you have it." —Blake Butler

„Gordon Massman is the author of The Essential Numbers 1991 – 2008, published in June 2009 by Tarpaulin Sky Press. The Essential Numbers—which most readers would recognize as a collection of poems, although Massman prefers to call them “texts”—is something of “new & selected,” in that it includes texts from Massman’s previous volume, The Numbers (Pavement Saw Press, 2000) as well as selections from the 700+ pieces Massman has written in the years since. As their titles suggest, Massman’s texts since 1991 have been numbered sequentially, and at the time of this interview, are closing in on 2000.
Given that Gordon’s work is profoundly disturbing, in a manner and to a degree that invites even seasoned readers (and fellow writers) to over-identify its speaker(s) with its author, and given that Gordon has, over the last two decades, firmly positioned himself outside of any known school of poetics, never mind any organized network of writers, be it established, academic, small press, micropress, underground or otherwise, and given that Gordon’s book is in many ways new territory for Tarpaulin Sky Press, I thought an interview with Gordon might be in order. Rather than conducting the interview myself—which, as his publisher, would have felt awkward if not incestuous—I decided that Gordon, his work, and his readers would be better served by a more open Q & A format. I asked five people, all writers themselves, to ask Gordon some questions about The Essential Numbers, and that’s all the direction I gave.
Gordon’s answers arrived four hours after I sent the last set of questions to him, three days after the first set. I did not edit them. --Christian Peet

BLAKE BUTLER: In a book that spans 18 years of writing, how did you select which numbers were most essential to you? What is different about the continuity of those numbers with the others removed—i.e., do you see new gaps, collisions, etc?
- Three decades ago I heard a quote, whose attribution I have long since forgotten, which fascinated me. It goes something like this: the most effective map is the exact same size as the territory being mapped. I imagine each of four corners of this crinkling paper map floating down to and settling precisely over its corresponding corner so that the map and the land are indistinguishable. This map illuminates for the traveler every vein, rivulet, fissure, and slope; it opens the land’s every pore for meditation and discovery.
Similarly, I find something equally fascinating about the psychoanalytic project—applying the same rigor to the cartography of one’s inner territory. Only in this case the map covers three dimensions and looks more like mist settling over deep plunging glass architectures, inside and out.
Leaving the map metaphor for a moment—at some point in my politics, I lost interest in conventional titles. I felt, and still feel, that the conventional title encapsulates a poem, monumentalizes it, loops its ending to its beginning and pulls tight the chord so that it relates only marginally to the works around it. Putting aside the fact that too many poets use titles, infuriatingly to me, to showcase cuteness, to show us how clever they can be, titles rip words out of relationship into independence, into stubborn free-floating self-sufficiency. This self-sufficiency is antithetical to both maps mentioned above and, ultimately, to what, megalomaniacally, I am striving to accomplish: a related, stitched-together, interdependent covering with language of my entire psyche from the beginning of my revelation until my end. The literal numbers for me are like threads woven together to form this covering, this tarp, if you will. Number 1 hooks onto and winds about number 2, number 2 hooks onto and winds about number 3, number 3 hooks onto and winds about number 4, etc. In short, the entire now one thousand nine-hundred ninety-six pieces (I do not really like to call them poems) are but one single entity, one map, tarp, coating, or whatever you wish to call it. Each number adds length, width, and depth to the one before it.
Finally, to your question. Yes, dropping out large sections of this map forms gaps, rents in the map. These holes force the wanderer to jump over disorienting spaces, from one cliff to another perhaps weeks or months apart. Such omissions take the softness—the safety—out of the singular blanket I am trying to weave. My hubris would prefer, naturally, to publish the entire project without omission in perhaps two volumes: two thousand pages of what I have already completed, and in volume two the final installments I have yet to complete before I die. I would love it if it could be said of me that I attempted the impossible task of transferring myself entire to the world of language, that I replicated all dimensions of myself and, therefore, continued to live, to be known, into perpetuity. How insane is that? How mad?
So sure, unintended collisions exist in this volume which by necessity picks and chooses what Christian Peet, my editor, and I felt were the strongest pieces. I am entirely happy with this. There is, after all, a practical consideration with all art. Some of one’s oeuvre is better than others, one is in better form on one day than another. One must always discard one’s breakage to strengthen the whole.
I am sorry to go on at such length, but please indulge me a little longer. I do not subscribe to the perceived wisdom, the laws of literature promulgated largely by academics and furthered by large segments of the intelligentsia, that poetry and prose are distinct and separate warring genres, to be defended to the death by proponents. For me, at least in modern times, the divisions falls more logically between effective, powerful writing and ineffective, weak writing. What law forces the lyric “poet” into small orgasmic increments while similarly demanding the “prose” writer spin out developed stories. Why cannot a writer, such as I, produce a single voluminous piece, hopefully, of effective, powerful language without being characterized as poet or prosaist. I intend my numbered work to be a single, inner-logical, complex entity, and in that sense, yes, the gaps do disappoint me—practical considerations aside—and create jarring collisions.
BLAKE BUTLER: Do you feel a different person inside your text than you are in your body? Is the writing a focusing of another person, or a removal, or some kind of smudge therein? Or is it something else entirely?
- I believe the great nerve-work and fiery forge within each one of us almost godly in its omniscience and powers of perception. I believe you, Blake Butler, are murderer, industrialist, mendicant, spiritualist, rapist, whore, misogynist, and lover. I believe you are all human permutations from Hitler to Gandhi. When a man is nailed to a tree for his sexuality or ethnicity, I believe you are both the nailer and the appalled. You both refuse slavery and smoke crack alone in dingy rooms. You are God and The Devil.
I throw as best I can, as believably as I can, the billion colors of human existence through the prism of myself. Over long and intense personal interior struggles I have unearthed my otherwise unspeakable capabilities and visceral dark emotions: rage’s boiling mud, shame’s hot cauldron, the alligators of self-loathing. Not only am I a beautiful child, I am a hideous monster.
Like us all.
Therefore, the person in my body and the person in my text are one in the same. He is me, and I am flinging from my deepest core—making visible—what is universal, I believe, in every male human being. I want my work to spark if not an already conscious embracing, then some subterranean dreamlike ghostly recognition of who you, my reader, are. I want to insist that my sometimes disturbing visions are more or less within everyone, with slight variations. Hasn’t every father fantasized infanticide? Doesn’t every husband want to binge on lovers. Doesn’t murder and suicide lurk in every man?
Like the majority of people, I live a pacifist’s life; I am gentle, tender, soft-spoken, kind. I am generally a courteous and decent citizen. That person, too, resides in my text and body alike; indeed, were he not there to mediate—if he were not infinitely stronger—I would probably not be an intellectualizing writer harmlessly throwing out human colors, but a bona fide miscreant and soul ripper.
ELENA GEORGIOU: What is your latest obsession, and how does it work its way into the poem you are currently writing?
- Curious you use this word “obsession,” rather, than say, “preoccupation” or “fixation.” To me “latest” implies these latter words and not the former. I’m splitting hairs, but I have a reason. I have been twice hospitalized with obsessive-compulsive disorder; I have battled it for twenty-five years. If it had a physical appearance it would resemble one of those hairless, mountainous, many-fanged monsters lurking at the bottom of a Hollywood pit villains throw men into to die. In reality, it’s a deathless monster wreaking havoc on innocent lives. This kind of clinical monster does not back down or mutate into something else. My clinical obsessions have numbered over thirty at any given moment, which I had to perform in a specific order at threat of having to repeat them beginning with number one, ad infinitum, through the night without sleep or rest. These involve locks, clocks, ovens, toilet seats, numbers, body lotions, dental floss, defecation, urination, noises, bottom sheets, light switches, hunger, toilet paper, and edges of desks. These are bizarre, inexplicable, torturous non-subjects, although the underlying monolithic demon of OCD infuses my work. That is, my death battle with OCD becomes a heightened metaphor in my work for all peoples’ battle against mortality. Hence, the outrage, despair, resignation, viscera, and velocity of my writing.
On the other hand, fixations, preoccupations. My most recent is hubris, the fatal fall in the face of God-aspiration. I think of Herzog’s masterpiece, Aguirre, the Wrath of God. How pathetic human beings look in their ridiculous gear “conquering” a river or a mountain. How pitiful our rocket ships spewing into space, like sparks popping two feet above a campfire. I am amused by the tragedy of megalomania, man’s ridiculous attempt to stick his or her jaw out beyond all others in the bas relief sculpture of squirming humanity.
Other fixations, always there, which I shoot through myself variously depending on life situations are: body weight; sex, death, hedonism, suicide, and parenticide. I usually mix one or more of these sub-dominantly into whatever I am writing, primarily because they are my major subjects.
Your question, how such preoccupations work their way into what I am writing, is a difficult one to answer. This will sound phony or like a parody, but I write in a trance; I literally put my head in my hands, close my eyes, and induce random dream-state imagery, very similar to deep sleep dreams. I can sit in that position for as long as an hour, eyes closed, half asleep, yet monitoring the ribbon of language streaming through me. If something authentic flies by I grab it and hurl it on the screen, at which point I might consciously build on it, but always quickly re-induce this dream state which usually takes the work in unexpected directions. I believe that we all possess a root system of logic, under ground as it were, and that if we harvest it naturally—genuinely—within ourselves, ideas which appear disconnected will in fact be connected and logical. I depend a great deal on the subconscious.
Who has a “poetic sensibility,” who is a natural singer and who isn’t? Who has that indefinable something in their gut, can play words like the virtuoso violinist? That is a question for the gods. Whether I have it, or you have it, or he or she has it, one must summon every ounce of power from within to compose one decent song in ten. All the obsessions, preoccupations, passions, and ideas are fairly worthless without this X factor, this musicality which none of us will ever know if we possessed.
ELENA GEORGIOU: What was the first obsession you tried to explore with writing? Do you still have that piece of writing?
- My life cleanly broke into two disparate parts, like the Gregorian calendar; my B.C. period—Before Crisis—lasted until I was thirty-four years old and was marked by a measured control and possession of the senses. It was a paradisiacal sense of well-being and youthful confidence wherein everything blossomed and shone for me, producing a fairly standard poetic fare: poems about Mary Magdalene washing clothes in a river or the one who discovered the artichoke or the hurricane I witnessed as a boy or the Beluga whales off the coast of Seward, Alaska. The poems were conventional and composed in the stepped-back object vein of a very clever man with something profound to say. It was capital P Poetry of the sort best exampled by Harvard and Sorbonne graduates such as Richard Howard, Richard Wilbur, John Ashbury, James Merrill, and Jorie Graham—people with intellects and IQs massive enough to win them staggering careers. The rest of us bashed our heads against their wall.
My A.D. period began the moment I accidently tuned into the movie Sybil, about a multiple personality woman and her sadistic mother, which unleashed from my neck high false floor all my weltering monsters. What clawed through the plywood my denial I had nailed over them: primal rage against my parents, my subtly lousy marriage, a horrible self image, resentment toward my young son, and what felt like an unnamable cloud of other demons minor and major. Here began twenty years of psychological battering during which time I developed the demon seed of OCD—my attempt to ward off catastrophe by endlessly performing rituals—and the undergirding for the employment of obsessional subjects in writing.
My first obsession was about insomnia and sleep, as I slept almost not at all for thirteen months, and I still have in a basement box a manuscript of about twenty-five short poems titled, Quarry for Night Howlers, which one could say prefigured the kind of pieces I write today. They are prose poems without stanza written urgently to help me heal. Since the moment the demons cracked through and crawled into my head, writing has been my therapy, my catharsis, and unabashedly I have placed the reader directly behind the psychoanalyst’s couch whatever may come; my poems are psychoanalytical sessions; I have tried to set horror to music for my own benefit. But, I think in my optimistic periods, perhaps others too could benefit from my effort.
SELAH SATERSTROM: Gordon, there are so many commas in the poems. For a couple of years I've been thinking about the energetics of grammar—how those marks/structural hinges constellate the logic that emerges from the syntax in the space/field of the line/lyric. Sometimes in the presence of yr poem's commas, I give them a sound. The terrible gurgle and swish and popping of a function, performing (the animal in the muscle or the sound of deep inner-space, the oceanic echo in meat). Other times the commas feel like gut—a particular texture of connectivity. Sometimes they are like a hot tongue—a kind of, you know, devil tongue (oy): commas as swipe marks, the incessant interruption of which Blanchot speaks. Neither here nor there. But I want to ask you about the comma—the form and narrative speed they contribute to or even co-create in your work. ”Comma”—from koptein "to cut off, " from PIE base *(s)kep- "to cut, split." I suppose what I am really asking you to speak about—to any aspect of—concerns how you experience language on metaphysical and/or visceral levels—its translation through your syntax and marks, into the forms... how that happens for you.
- The man who has been shot doesn’t have time to put on a suit. He’s on the table shouting, “here, here, lower, the gut, oh Jesus, please god though I walk, yea, valley, no evil, fuck, god damn, shit. . . .”
There’s no metaphysics here, no formalism, no important superstructure, no Ph.D. in grammatology. I stopped using periods and capital letters to begin new sentences because I haven’t the time. Screw convention, measured breathing, jam and croissants, the contemplated stanza, do I break here or here, how much white space, is it poetry or prose. My psyche’s hemorrhaging, emotional blood’s gushing. Goddammit, I’m hit. I’m trying to save my life.
(Surely “form” solidifies subject, is in fact subject, as subject is in fact form. My “form” is the brick of terror, guilt, shame, pain, horror, hope, rage, love, and innocence jammed into my head, square, compositionally shifting, and lodged like a bloody bludgeon I can only exorcize it by duplicating it on the page, repeatedly and, perhaps, eternally.)
SELAH SATERSTROM: I wonder what you look at or listen to: the necessary juxtapositions that inform your process.
- I revere great world cinema. Among my favorite directors are Imamura, Fassbinder, Herzog, Bergman, Varda, Passolini, Cocteau, Dryer, DeSica, Wertmuller, Satyajit Ray, Fellini, von Stroheim, Bresson, Schoendorfer, Resnais, Bunuel. Some of my favorite movies are The Passion of Joan of Arc by Dryer, Aguirre, the Wrath of God by Herzog, Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom by Passolini, 8 1/2 by Fellini, Shame by Bergman, The Ballad of Narayama by Imamura, Woman of the Dunes by Teshigahara, Au hasard Balthazar by Bresson.
Elias Canetti, Naguib Mahfouz, Vladimir Nabakov, Borges, V. Woolf, Mishima, Kobo Abe, Musil, George Konrad, Calvino, Kenzaburo Oe, R. Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Paton, Nicanor Parra, R. Jeffers, Ted Hughes, Alan Dugan, Berryman, Sexton, Whitman, Dostoevsky, Laxness, Hamsun, Kafka, James Wright... I have a love affair with literature and in addition to “the classics” seek out esoteric obscure works in translation wherever I can find them. I favor creative artists of all genres who dip their instruments directly into the gut, bypassing that cool, objective, distant intellect. I prefer interiors to exteriors, juice to dry, messy psychological eviscerations to cold perfectionism.
I rarely listen to music but when I do I almost always return to sixties and seventies rock: Zeppelin, Hendrix, Cream, early Santana, CSNY, Jefferson Airplane, Joplin, The Doors, Ten Years After, Quicksilver Messenger Service. I love the Chicago blues and Jazz but don’t know much about them. I don’t understand classical music and am continually mystified by how it fills enormous music halls generation after generation with such passionate devotees. But this is my failure.
I am a tireless devotee of the arts and just wish I had more time to explore them.
ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ & AMY KING: In your poems life is a serial killer. Is the trauma he inflicts primarily mental or physical?
- Physically, I’m in good shape (well, cancer survivor) for a sexagenarian. Mental.
But, short of some heinous assault against one’s person, I don’t think life is a serial killer. I think life (nature, existence, breathing, feeling) is wonderful. For me the serial killer resides within, with only one victim, who keeps getting up.
ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ & AMY KING: If you can't adore a woman and you can't hate her, what can you do with her? I really want to know.
- Confusion here, one that has caused me much unjustified criticism and, from my partners, pain. The confusion is this: I am my poetry. I am the man who can neither adore nor hate a woman, who tortures cats, who eats himself. I have done none of these things and am not the persona of my work. This is an impossible issue to untangle, it’s as enmeshed into itself as flesh is to veins; it’s all of a piece. Where does artist leave off and persona begin? Kafka, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Hemingway: were they beetles, murderers, misanthropes, and misogynists? Yes, that is—partially—their conceit, but were they that as companions and compatriots. As lovers?
On the basis of my writing I have been rejected by women who otherwise loved me. “I cannot stay with a man who could write this,” they said, attributing more life to my poetry than to me. My work frightens them even though, as witnessed by the fact that they love me, and by their own admission, I am not a frightening man. My poetry embarrasses them and shames them in public. They hide it from their friends. To this I say, if you cannot understand the complexity of art and artist, confuse him with ink and white paper or paint and canvas or iron and sculpture, then, yes, I think we are ill-suited.
What I can do with a woman is love her in the same flawed imperfect way all lovers love, even better than some.
ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ & AMY KING: If "vision is puncturing," is the goal of poetry the blast or the emptiness after the blast? Which is more important?
- That’s a sexual question: orgasm vs. after orgasm, so I’ll answer it sexually. If the poem is like a love interest—you woo her, you romance her, and then, maybe, you have her—then for me it is the instant of penetration, the exhilarating instant of grasping those last words.
ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ & AMY KING: Is the lasting flaccidity of an executed idea really something to aspire to—turning boner into bone?
- Sometimes the flaccid man is lying alongside a suddenly conceived woman. It is delusional, of course, to equate a work of art to a fetus, but your assumption that once finished the work is a lasting shred of flaccidity is invalid for me.
When young I aspired, romantically, megalomaniacally, to write something so real it lived, that the pages of my theoretical book would groan to get out and actually bounce up the covers like a coffin lid. I wanted to create something so honest it squirmed with new life.
I don’t believe in the flaccidity of a finished work—I aspire to write poems that embody enough “life” in them to conceive in the lives of others.
ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ & AMY KING: If you can't love men and you can't kill men, what can you do with them? I really want to know.
- Two and a half decades ago I lunched with a certain radiant and conceited young male sociology professor at his faculty club (U. Wisconsin). Menus in hand, we were greeted by a stunningly gorgeous waitress. “Bring me the roast beef with vegetables, and a Coke,” said he. I said something similar, maybe “Baked chicken, white meat, tea.” When she left he raved, “Beautiful, amazing, ooo-la-la, must have her, who is she, think she’s a student, see the way she looked at me, she noticed me, that ‘I’m available to you’ look, she’s mine, I know it.” I agreed, “Adorable, excruciating beautiful, did you see those ankles, those feet, those perfect toes, oh man.” Then I looked him in the eye and said, “What if she prefers me?” A bullet entered his brain. “Then,” he said, “I would have to leave the table.”
In matters of sex and love men are each other’s rivals. If both want the same woman, then they hate each other and it is an unendurable pain not to be chosen. The greatest pleasure is lost to the rival and the loser graphically visualizes the other receiving it, the wetness, the kisses, the caresses, the wonderful penetration.
In a locker room naked men simultaneously feel solidarity and repugnance. They dare not accidently touch each other in the shower stall without feeling revulsion, that competitive matted body hair touching me. Their dangling weaponry. It’s an animal visceral reaction. All men (heteros, of course) want all women and fantasize destroying the competition.
So, I lie that I am the more desirable in order to befriend men. As long as I feel superior, I find men acceptable companions. My best male friends are in their 70s and 80s and unable to do harm to me.
This is oversimplification as men do have fishing, camping or football buddies, but I think the deeper animal primal rivalry lurks underneath it all.
What do I do with men? Depending on the man, I screw up my psychology and behavior therapy strategies and try my best to enjoy their company. In many cases, I do.
ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ & AMY KING: Are you the Sam Kinison of poetry?
- Without the humor, unfortunately.
ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ & AMY KING: Do you love? Are you loved?
- I’m self-critical and insecure and find it difficult to believe that I am loved. Yet, I feel loved by one or two.
I subscribe to Eric Fromm’s concept of the word “love” (in The Art of Loving). Loving is an art to be practiced and mastered. To succeed one must make it his or her highest priority. Most fail. Most flounder in passive pools. I believe that, at sixty, after dozens of attempts, I have learned to love, passably, acceptably, maybe even beautifully. I do believe that loving is human beings’ most divine calling. It’s just infernally hard.
ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ & AMY KING: Why don't you just fucking calm down?
- Don’t think there’s a why here. When the fire burns up all the wood, it will die. I guess there’s still wood.
(I am calm on the outside.)
ANA BOŽIČEVIĆ & AMY KING: (How) do you think life translates into poetry? How much is it a question of translation and how much of transmutation/alchemy? Does the voice in this book suffer because he is not an alchemist?
- Lead into gold, transmuting sinful human into perfect being, creating the panacea. No, I have not done that. I go into my gut and amygdala (base instincts, drives, motivations, urges, fantasies, reptilian capabilities). There once existed alchemists, the finest in the land, who perfected the art and against whom present-day alchemist-hopefuls can only be derivative. I speak of Keats, Shelly, Byron, Rumi, Blake, Wordsworth, Dante, etc. My voice certainly would suffer were I to try to emulate these alchemist/masters. They had their pre-Freudian day of courtesies, formalities, corsets, class punctilio, platitudes, meticulousness, generalities, and narcissism. We have our post-Freudian-Einsteinian day of nihilism, nuclear fission, hedonism, birth control patch, gluttony, environmental destruction, and postmodernism. I write for my day and do not suffer that I, or my persona, is not an alchemist. Once it was transmutation, now its translation." - Interview at Trickhouse

"1428
Today he awoke with apples for eyeballs, bright red jonathans misshaping facial bones, two roasted pig heads on vertical platters, black swollen eyes lids cannot fold over, stems upward like rope fuses, big dappled bulging apples, visionless, pulpy, fresh but growing rotten and ripe for fruit flies, he would be a nest, and these things braided to the optic nerve like weird lanyards, love-transformations, hands into spatulas, knees into spuds, and orbital apples, she resembles the apple, rotund, globular, cupped, a round bumpy ball prying his sockets, they're all one apple--cores, hearts, achilles heels, mahogany seeds, appetites and rejections, coquetry and refusals, the sweetest little hooves--too many bushels, his face aches from gratitude; to a man a billion women flown together with compressive force into a mass resemble the apple crammed into his sockets at three AM, hard crisp ones squinching his face with powers of destruction, every molecule burgeoning with droplet of cider, he adores, he applies no discrimination, the disconnected molecules catch between his sockets rushing to his heart, this morning he awoke moaning with sweetness, big three-dimensional sweetness large as softballs, door knobs, hip replacement joints, he swayed, he knocked over candles, he stubbed right knee blind with significant brutalizing gorgeous orchard pieces.

1379
Huey, Dewey, and Louie bring home three whores for dinner.
Huey gets spanked and blown, Dewey's a blind patient at the doctor's, Louie does it dog style on the sheepskin throw, three women contain duck come like mechanically filled mustard jars. How they worship zooming tits, purchased lips, the soft slot machine of the naked woman. A stogie turns Huey green poor mallard, night's growing sour, the promise of vomit, frankly diarrhea's looming in guts of three like bruisy storms, but hell we're men aren't we? gimme a Pabst, and red between the orange webs sucks off his purple cock, and evening drags, dies, the females split, the males blacked out, ash trays, tumbler rings, mixer packets, missed chunks, Donald and Daisy anticipating an after the movie tumble pissed at the profligate nephews, sailor suits and menstrual blood. Donald to Daisy: God dammit! Daisy to Donald: fuck! Donald to Daisy: Look at this shit. Daisy to Donald: Idiots. Dishwasher filled, blender upright, the boys covered in blankets where they lay, Daisy fucked Donald hell for leather till both sets of genitals failed with satiation, Donald stunned with love, penis a limp sore biceps, Daisy drunk with semen, inside out like a flaccid flower, hiving for conception, both fired and blown apart, hinged at the knees. Oh Donald, Oh Daisy, Oh Huey, Dewey, and Louie, swaddled, lifted, and held by God, suckled on heaven's nipple, do not sob the flesh- y mess of eggs and lust, sperm and hurt, the slimy floor of booze, must, and promises; sleep, safekeep, angels angels angels.

1433
Man distracts woman from self-deceit, without man she pretends the sanity of orderliness and spirituality, soft luminescent lunar creatures, tablets of the sky full of peaceful blue eggs and filigree thread, she accepts no earthquake from brutal male but wafts the blossom of universal peace through which men wage war like contrapuntal noise waving explosive phallic toys, extraneous sloppy unkempt men, domestically spastic against nurturing wholes; protect me from uncouth helpless aeternus beasts, those gluey tarbabies pulling out my peace, I denounce mens' arrogant dictatorialism and their indiscriminate dicks, for example when Gwen's schnauzer died together with photos we wept and memorialized Mitzie's collar while emotionless fathers fired cold steel, drifted to work, where's the cloven heart in masculine flesh, let us pray for metamorphosis among the warrior class, we're covered in white brocaded silk, swollen perfect contained ocean unbroken inside underpants, rose surrounded, calla blessed, pale millionstar spilling its chest, organdy kissed, lavender, oregano, vanilla, cacao, sweet yellow nibs, beautifully veiled for the wedding with pure gristle.

1262
Dear God: thank you for the physical beauty in the world, etc. / and get fucked. Brutality festers under veneer. Abercrombie / and Fitch and the other even-cornered orderly little boxes at- / op the cauldron of rage. I’ve read your absurd prevarications, / burning bush, parting sea, water to wine, the whole bloody / idiotic litany. What do you take me for? My son’s in jail, my / parents hate each other, and love is the biggest crock of shit / in our world. Take it up the ass mr. big. I shove it in and / squirt my ever-regenerating fascist through your anus. You / “work in mysterious ways.” Sure. Gotcha. Like multiple / sclerosis, cerebral hemorrhage, schizophrenia, ovarian can- / cer, gang rape, endless battlefield slaughter, hunger and / starvation, crack cocaine, mandatory economic survival, / family annihilation, serial killer, christmas eve, the whole / bloody genocidal mechanistic panoply of madness, dema- / goguery, power-lust, and blood papered over with The / David, Notre Dame, Starry Night, The Cello Suites, The / Divine Comedy, A Night at the Opera. You don’t fool me / with your poured concrete. The devil created you. Oops! / a brief eulogy-interlude for my latest decimated friend—bone / cancer—chemotherapy, steroids, morphine, marrow trans- / plant—closed his lids on two blonde daughters, 9 and 13— / hole in air, let me chant: HeyHeyHeyHey, HeyHeyHey, / Hey, Hayi-o-ku-oo, tum tum. Thank you mr. zero for an- / other picnic in the park. And he believed! But we know / the irrefutable; invisible wasp with hypodermic stinger whir- / ring through walls, money, steel, petition to jab it in the / neck. “Come down, Come down, why dost thou hide thy / face?” one frustrated poet begged. I will reveal. The mere / hideous outline of you visible would decimate all animal / hope or happiness. You think my personal circumstances / blind and embittering? Don’t make me laugh. I observe / with microscopic scientific objectivity the botanical, zo- / ological, and geological, and state with emotionless inan- / imacy the incontrovertible: I could wedge a baseball bat / up your lower orifice, swing, and Hercules-hurl you to / plague another planet-island of cripples and cruciality with / your miracle-laden-liturgy and it would take a lifetime of / restitution to clean the crap off the end of Louisville wood.

1995
Something he covets suspends mid-air before him, the materiali-
zation of longing, yes, that’s it, he exclaims, precisely, all
else curls back from this brilliance like plowed clay, I have
desired this my entire life, like cavity desires gold, and now
it appears solid, attainable, filling the void, how long I have
prayed for this perfection, he reveals, in this disappointing
world and awakened mournful, bolts tightened to bluntness,
a naked blunt machine draped in plant products cleverly
dyed, never until now has the hope of completion floated so
close, it breathes down neck, colostrum sweet, soft pullulation,
not like pear for brutal plucking, but a fragile thing, skittish,
easily vanishing in discomposure, I shall employ my wiliest
art, my Mesmeric talent to this is non-negotiable presence,
gesture, innuendo, inflection, suggestion, the hypnotist’s
penetration of spellbound innocents, finally the end of false
conquests, the slashing through and disposal of insignifi-
cance has led to this incalculable treasure, and, he pledges
resolutely, I shall possess it, it shall be mine, as is my breast’s
hammer, my appendix and esophagus, I shall introduce ir-
resistible tension along crucial surfaces, the hypnotic brow,
magical spaces, the well-orchestrated reserve, classical
boyishness requiring ministration, the mysterious wield, the
aesthetic magnetism of power fused with ease until wil-
lingly into the beautiful trap it slips eradicating my despair."

Gordon Massman, 0.174: The Complete Numbers Cycle, The New York Quarterly Foundation, 2011.

“Shocking, intense, vulgar and honest” are the words English/Communications Professor Gordon Massman uses to describe his poetry.
The New York Quarterly Foundation will publish a 400-page collection from 3,000 original pages of his poetry this month called “0.174: The Complete Numbers Cycle.” Massman has been composing poetry for 40 years. This will be his fifth book.
“The title comes from the Visible Human Project where the human body was sliced into .174 mm strips,” Massman said. “Theoretically, I sliced my brain in an attempt to make public every male fantasy, desire and motivation.”
He describes his poetry as psychoanalytic, an addiction that guides him to understanding himself.
“I became a poet because I wanted to be and my psyche demanded this of me,” he said.
His poetry has been published in over 200 literary journals in the United States and Canada.
The central message of his work is a focus on the human body.
“This book has the potential of being a great influence in poetry,” he said. “It has been my lifelong project, and now it’s finished.”
Massman drew upon personal experiences from his past and said his book naturally grew out of his need to scream and rage. He treats all issues graphically and discourages anyone with a weak stomach to pick up his book.
“Most poetry is polite and civilized. It all sounds the same,” Massman said. “My poetry is designed to punch the status quo in the gut.”
Massman said no one can write about the psychology of a human being without discussing taboo issues. He also does not title his poems, but grants them numbers like in the Visible Human Project.
“Gordon Massman is the kind of writer that guts you, revolts you, makes you fall in love or in a lake, and makes you want to live a little bit realer in your own world,” said Shelly Taylor, a writer and friend from Tucson, Ariz.
Massman also remarked that poetry is losing momentum; very few people are interested anymore. Although he said he writes his poetry for himself, he feels a great reward when people read his work.
He encourages student poets to be honest with themselves and their readers. He said a true poet must hold the courage to look at him- or herself, inside and out.
He compares his poetry to Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” which praised the body and the human mind.
Massman’s previously published books include The Essential Numbers 1991-2008 and “Gronk,” along with two others.
He is now writing love poems and said it is more challenging than his previous work.
“I need to push myself beyond what I’ve been comfortable with for so long,” he said. “I am exposing a tender side I never knew I had.” - Skyla Seamans

"I am counterpart to the Visible Human Project, I froze my
psyche in a gelatin-water bath, laid it on a slab, sliced it
with the solid-beam technological blade along the axial
plane, re-stacked it with 0.174 mm gaps between, photo-
graphed in position each revealing strip producing a 40
gigabyte 3-D holographic sculpture of the psychological
machine: rages, urges, fantasies, addictions, compulsions,
fears, each strip pulls to strangle or kiss you, dear reader,
or to label you fool, approach cautiously in curator’s un-
forgiving shadow-less light this impregnable solid glass
cube, its images wound, here is the passageway to your
private, painstakingly thorough tomographic exhibit, step
through, walk forward, for nobody but you does it glitter."
Gordon Massman, Gronk, Six Gallery Press, 2004.

„what he gouges out is man's original howl, what the baby's feeble scream connotes as it voices across this life of sexuality, competition, envy, greed, generosity, homicidal fantasies, terror, and loving kindness. The swirling admixture blending one into a human frappe of conflicting emotions. This courageous writer sinks his metaphorical pipe directly into his gut bypassing the compulsive delusions of the mind.“

"This to the poetry editor of The New Republic:

Dear Editor,
I pick up, by fiat, the May 20, '09, edition of The New Republic to discover the little vapid piece, "Perfect Repose" by Mark Doty. Here the educated observer turns his clinical shutter onto a school of sea lions, credibly describing (one assumes) from the planks of a pier, their "effortless oscillations" through sea water. One can imagine the collective "Ah!" of the audience at the final lines, "I mean thou/all breathe in again at once." "Ah!" they exhale tapping liberated fingers on forehead.

What we have here is a gliding slice of surfaces, a little curving carve-up of the external canvas, serving as nothing more than an interlude or pleasing public service announcement between crucial human stories, and as such is a cowardly act. I would not like to be in relationship with Mr. Doty, as he evidently would trivialize, deflect, or ignore conflict and resolution. He would, instead, rhapsodize on a flight of starlings or a field of wind blown grasses. To being asked to discuss his inability to love, he would respond by beautifully describing blackberry-stained fingertips.

Sir or Madam, poetry is art and art is urgency, significance, shock, disclosure, pain, peeling back surfaces, prophesy. Any dolt could describe the ballet of sea-lions and many dolts have. Rather than blindly following the blind--in this case blind poetry editor following blind book publisher into the void of vapidity, I ask you to open your eyes to the powerful possibilities of poetry, no less an art than sculpture, painting, architecture, music, all of which do nothing if they do not haul the self-satisfied into themselves for a little cold appraisal.

I suggest you ditch the careerists such as Mark Doty, and look a little deeper, on you own. Try for instance, my own selected poems, "Gordon Massman, The Essential Numbers, 1991-2008, just published from Tarpaulin Sky Press, one of dozens of literary presses which have the courage and independence to champion serious art. Had you the editorial maturity, I would direct you to http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/ for a look.
Sincerely,
Gordon Massman"

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