Gordon Massman "Core Sample"
38 pages
letterpressed raw board cover w/ vellum bellyband
Reclaimed Pantone test-sheet hinge/spine
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SPORKCHAP02:Massman

Core Sample is just that: a selection from a long sequence of poems in which each poem is numbered and then chronologically sequenced. These poems provide meditations on themes comparable to those used by Robinson Jeffers, such as violence, incest, with an aversion to a world increasingly “futuristic.”

Burning with fire too hot for Satan, these polemic monologues, with one sentence per stanza, and one stanza per poem, most poems feature rhetoric which directly address the reader, thus setting precedent for a discussion:

One learns to eat one’s dog, paw and nail, knobby leg, up
leg to brisket, flews, withers, loin, meal upon meal, ears,
snout, muscle, spleen, lab, retriever, shepherd, one learns
to eat one’s dog by examining champions

These rhetorical bursts provide excitement as well as in invitation to join this fabulist world:

“bring me love,” I’ll spear my heart like a grouper,
serve it in steaks and cubes while simultaneously resurrect-
ing my pulsing pump, dual aortic tubes feeding midnight
bliss, nerves of spun glass,

The surreal scenes that take place recall the imagination of Russell Edson’s work, (such as eating an orangutan at a dinner table, or a tree killing a woman while her husband asks questions), but from a voice with equal drops vitriol and humor:

Sylvester smokes a stogie with which he
ignites a fuse but Tweetie has reconfigured things, the bomb blows
off Sylvester’s tail, he slinks fuming and ashamed

As these sentences serpentine through syntax and semantics, the speaker himself, if not the poet, openly celebrates an aesthetic of verse that favors “sloppy the word, belly slopping over belt.” Within this “slop,” and through these complex sentences, the reader gets proposals on how the poet plans to make a world they prize:

I invent a machine extracts fat from flesh, a processor: compu-
ter, magneto, alternating scalpels, switches, speeds, monolithic
cube, stand in drain pan, embrace like table, bent over and
forward, arms in grooves, with fingertip flip switch

As these poems jump from moments of vulnerability to moments more visceral moments exposing the animals of humans,the trajectory may be said to finnaly lead to meditations on what we can expect, as in this excerpt proposing what humans will next be subject to:

                                                                                   reproductive
tar submitting in unprecedented speed liquefaction and per-
ishment, genetics, psychopharmacology, particle physics,
cybernetics, make the fatuous billion cheeks into death
masks, go forth, loved ones, with new efficiency, and kill.

With dense sound patterns, rich with alliteration and slant-rhyme, and subject matter which suit both scholar and scoundrel, this work provides much for discussion.