In this issue. . . FlashPøint editor Rosalie Gancie's longstanding interest in the book arts leads us back to Andrea Zemel's Democrazy--a letterpress & block print sculptural manuscript [i.e. artist's book] that includes the poetry of our own Joe Brennan. Andrea's impetus is the examination of "the problem of cultural origins and where they have brought us" and their expression through both textual & visual forms. She continues this theme in two of her more recent works: the glass & ceramic mosaics Chronos & Orion's Dog. Orion's Dog in particular is a glass & ceramic textual rendering of Book 22 of the Iliad.

And Alan Tucker is no stranger to the book arts. He, along with T.R. Glover, Brian Morse and Morris Cox were responsible for the little magazine Format (1966-1971), which was issued through Alan and Joan Tucker’s bookshop. Morris Cox, the noted Gogmagog private press artist & publisher not only contributed poetry to Format, but also provided original hand printed covers for four of the issues. (See Bradford Haas's comments on Cox, Format & Alan Tucker in FlashPoint 6: Introductory Note on Sources for the Morris Cox Texts, and Morris Cox's work at our online Morris Cox Centennial Exhibit.

More recently Alan tends to print from his computer (as does his friend Thomas A. Clark) in very small editions intended mainly for private distribution. His press is called Stilt Press, and his current submission of Rilke translations is drawn from a recently produced booklet. Prompted by translations of Rilke by Seamus Heaney and Valery, Tucker tries to engage the poems himself with his own translations & his own sonnet inspired by Rilke & Valery's own versions. He explains this process with his Prefatory Note and proceeds to the translations, beginning with DER APFELGARTEN [The Apple Orchard].

FlashPoint & Bradford Haas continue our ever-growing online archive of the work of artist, poet & printmaker Morris Cox with the addition of A WAY OF WOMAN, 9 Original Xerographs from the Gogmagog Photocopy Library, 1989.

Peter O'Brien ("Four Fascinations") and Shahar Gold ("Journals from the Land of Parparazad", and other short-shorts) are very different kinds of writers, but the one thing that can be said in common of their work is that the terms "farce" and "whimsy" are wholly inadequate. I won't even try to characterize their pieces, although I suspect you too will laugh.

Peter Dale Scott is represented by a sequence of five long poems entitled Mosaic of Orpheus: Five Canadian Poems.

T.R. Wang and Charles Belbin in Going Up To Sun Terrace by Li Bai give a marvelous appraisal of the poetry and calligraphy of the tenth century Chinese lyric poet, sparked by a serendipitous discovery by arts editor Rosalie Gancie.

Cris Mazza helped launch FlashPoint on-line in the very first issue of Spring 1997 with a chapter from her then forthcoming novel, Girl Beside Him. She also contributed two short-shorts, "What Kind of Mother" and "Who is This Guy?", to FlashPoint #5. (In that same issue Cam Tatham also told us a little more about Mazza's work and its affect on students in "Libidinal Confusion".) FlashPoint has also reviewed a couple of her novels. Here Mazza speaks for herself, especially about her most recent work, in a conversation with Kat Meads.

Ellen Cardona has given us another chapter, Pound’s Early Years, 1885-1924: The Evolution of a Suburban Prejudice, from her ground breaking, book length manuscript on Pound and anti-Semitism. Ms. Cardona carefully analyzes aspects of American and European cultural and political prejudice which were formative for Pound’s anti-Semitism.

Joan McCracken, whose "Almost Thirteen" appears in FlashPoint #6, returns with "As Kingfishers Catch Fire", a tale of Cold War Berlin and the strange resonance between two strangers on either side of the Wall whose disparate quests for what each imagines to be "freedom" lead them toward each other and very equivocal destinies.

At the age of four JR Foley fell in love with Donald Duck, and again, at a more advanced age, with Annette Who-Else?, Mousketeer princess. But the Walt Disney character he could not get enough of, perhaps a truer, deeper, even terryfing love, was Captain Nemo of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Nemo was an especially resonant figure for a 1950s America haunted by its own atomic bombs -- a terrorist for peace, whose weapon, the submarine Nautilus, was propelled by the secret energy of the sun. This Nemo's true creator, Uncle Walt himself, turned out to be a master propagandist for Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program. In reaction to the nuclear nightmare, Walt produced the 1950s dream image of a world blessed, no longer cursed, by atomic power -- Disneyland. Yet what became of Walt's love affair with the atom? Most mysterious. Check out "Our Friend the Atom: Walt Disney and the Atomic Bomb."

Joe Brennan contributes another 1200 lines of his polyglot masterpiece with Der Fodderland Über Alles .

David Hickman’s luminous 10 poems from Reverse Oedipus continue the poet’s intense reflections on politics, history and morality.

We also include another long poetic meditation by David Kaufmann called Husbandry.

We have Nathan Lang’s enigmatic My Civil War Education: a Reconstruction, a piece that fashions a brief narrative from the shards of his experience both personal and literary as well as NAME: A verbal exercise in channeled dialog on the theme of the Holy Scriptures

Poetry’s flarfiest bon vivant and foremost authority on authorship in poetry, Kent Johnson, has once again graced our humble electronic pages with 6 new works: 4 X Kent Johnson and 2 X Kent Johnson .

Sasha Sommeil entertains us with a whimsical work Art For The Asses from behind the chain link nano-curtain.

Sporting the millennarian beard of Aubrey de Gray, Carlo Parcelli wanders the streets of 'the Capital of the Free World' howling his eschatological warnings of the impending end of the world. His most recent rantings have been collected by the psychological profile unit of the FBI and published in this issue of FP with the permission of the American Psychiatric Association and the Citiczens For A Sane Bourgeois. They are entitled Deconstructing the Demiurge: Eschatology of Reason: Shaping the Noise.

And Mr. Parcelli reveals a source in He Didn’t Really Mean It: Donald Hall’s “Poetry and Ambition.”

     Tell us what you think!

-- JR Foley & Carlo Parcelli