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Carlo Parcelli extends into “Millennial Mathematics” the long poem he has been developing in earlier FlashPøints. Joining him and Alison Croggon in this issue is Anthony George, whose considerably shorter poems, grouped as “subversions”, play in the FlashPøint spirit with politics as art. He is a Brooklyn school teacher who advocates, in his own words, “the spiritual overthrow of the U.S. government.” Contributing Editor Brad Haas, whose “David Jones: the Poet’s Place and the Sleeping Lord” was featured in FlashPøint #2, now contributes two parts (“Trifocal” and “Setting Stones”) of a long poem, whose introductory and completing part will join them in the 4th issue this fall.

     You’re familiar with the observation that fighting gets more vicious as the stakes get smaller? There is, of course, on a planetary scale, the politics of life and death, especially in places where, say, food is scarce and weaponry abundant. But there are other, smaller scales, where the politics is smaller … and on such a scale, recounts Kent Johnson in “Buffalo ’99” (reprinted from Skanky Possum), is the University of New York at Buffalo Poetics List, to which not all are admitted, and where not all who are admitted are always tolerated. Whereof he speaks he knows well, for since his essay was first published, Johnson himself has met the fate against which he protests so vigorously on behalf of others.

     From the beginning the poetry in FlashPøint has been devoted to the Pound-Olson tradition. So it is especially appropriate that this first release of the new century feature a consideration of part of that tradition. The well-known Bay Area poet Jack Foley (no relation, unfortunately, to the JR Foley penning these notes) examines Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse at 50” for fresh insight not only into Olson’s Maximus Poems and Pound’s Cantos, but into the ongoing project of poetry today.

     William Blum brings a very different perspective to the new century in America. The author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower has been documenting the development of the National Security State since World War II. “Treason: None Dare Call It Nothing” relates how a largely unknown Star Chamber-like court set up in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has allowed the FBI to entrap and imprison a Pentagon employee and her husband on espionage charges for attempting to pass not secret but public domain information to a South African deputy defense minister, who also happened to be a leader of the South African Communist Party.

     Perspective, both unique and now all too common, distinguishes Richard Hoffman’s critique of Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, How I Learned to Drive. Vogel’s play depicts a woman reassessing her relationship with the uncle-by-marriage who had molested her as a child. Hoffman, who himself experienced sexual abuse as a child, and whose perspective is fully detailed in his book Half the House, takes sharp issue with Vogel’s perspective in “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”.

     FlashPøint has always searched for fiction in that broad zone “where the arts and politics clash”; also fiction of all varieties of style and approach imaginable … some even “mainstream”. Such a range is sampled in this EXTRA! At the more familiar end, in “The Old Master Painter”, John A. Lane depicts the human comedy in the politics (and business, if this is not redundant) of art. Preston Heller’s “Illinois” tells a tale of seduction with life-long consequences in much more than one sense. Glen Cameron moves naturalism closer to nightmare in “Five”, where the real tale is what is not told. Nightmare of another sort crosses into the lunatic farce of David Alexander’s “Decoys”. And then we have the “Two Disquisitions” of Eugene Thacker, about which words fail me utterly, except — they’re science and they’re fiction — but they’re no science fiction the Science Fiction Writers of America would recognize.