Index3

In Our Time, as a rule, political action is disdained as fit matter for poetry; nor is Peter Dale Scott best known as a poet. But the author of Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, and The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era has also published Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror, Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse, and Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems. Coming to Jakarta and Listening to the Candle are the first two books of a trilogy long poem entitled Seculum, which concludes with Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000, scheduled for publication by New Directions in Fall 2000. A former Canadian diplomat in Poland, Scott meditates on personal experience as well as decades-long research into how political regimes, ancient and modern, tyrannical and democratic, seek to impose their will on their own and other people.

     The tensions between meaning (political and otherwise) and l’art pour l’art, especially in the Modernist tradition, have been an ongoing focus of FlashPøint. In his essay, “From Petit to Langpo: A History of Solipsism and Experience In American Poetics Since the Rise of Creative Writing”, Gabriel Gudding explores one arena of such tensions, tracing, from Julius Goebel to
Charles Bernstein, the pedagogical transformation of the underlying academic
theories of poetry and poetics of the Twentieth Century. Modernism itself gets mulched in reviews of several recent studies, by Mark Scroggins, Carlo Parcelli, and Brad Haas. Carlo
Parcelli, with his customary enthusiasm, also reviews Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs
and the Press by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. John, and contributes another off-the-lithium essay, The Yoke of Human Blindness: William S. Cohen, the Neo=Georgians, and the Apache Attack Helicopter of the Self, to FlashPøint‘s continuing series of Sobering Discussions of the Practice of Poetry in Our Age.

     In addition to new installments of the continuing works in progress and regress (respectively) of Joe Brennan and Carlo P., this issue of FlashPøint features poetry from Mairead Byrne, Gabriel Gudding, David Kaufmann (whose “Adorno and the Name of God” appeared in the first issue of FlashPøint), and Henry Gould. Ms. Byrne demonstrates why love poetry need never die. Gould’s poem, apposite to Mr. Gudding’s essay “From Petit to Langpo,” addresses a recent but ancient issue at the heart and at the throat of every poet, writer, artist, and general user-of-language everywhere, upon which Mr. Gould’s footnote expatiates. Mr. Gudding is acquainted with the occasion for Gould’s poem, and might have been thinking of it while penning “Dear Saccus Stercorum,”; except that, like Brennan’s and Parcelli’s, it is also a work in progress ever-evolving.

     FlashPøint has taken a special interest in graphic art of strong political resonance, as witness work by Amiri Baraka, Andrea Zemel, and Sue Coe in the first two issues. We’re excited to present with this issue Michael Allen, whose
“Crisis of Democracy” is sampled at the top of this page and in the current Galerie.

     But still graphics are not all. FlashPøint is especially happy with this issue to showcase animations of Rosalie Gancie, which bring the tradition of Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger to the computer age. Drawing from such venerable sources as Futurism, Vorticism and Russian constructivism, Gancie
juxtaposes mechanical and organic line and form to produce colorful, whimsical and surprising evolutions of visual metamorphosis. By rejecting the traditional programmatic or narrative elements of animation, Gancie reaffirms the value of abstract forms, as opposed to the simple manipulation of anthropomorphized digital figurines. She also resists the conceit of working exclusively in forms that reflect mathematical symmetry, thus pointing the way toward the true potential of computer animation.

     Not least among the arts of FlashPøint, fiction this time presents some novels-in-progress. Steve Katz, whose “GRAMNFD/BUTSTTS” appeared in issue #2, is back with “AGNES”, a tribal saga as pictured by Hollywood if it only dared. Not unrelated to Hollywood, in “AH DOAN KNOW NUTHIN’ ‘BOUT BRINGIN’ BABIES!” Toby Boudreaux takes on Gone With the Wind, which, whatever else can be said about it, remains one of the most fascinating novels America has produced. (Beckett read it in southern France while hiding from the Gestapo.) But Boudreaux’ retelling would no doubt outrage Margaret Mitchell, updating, inverting, and inside-outing the world she created. Totally unrelated to Hollywood, David Matlin’s “A HalfMan Dreamer” moves with accelerating metamorphoses of surreal detail, in poetry as well as prose, from a pre-Columbian Indian dig to Vietnam combat to Mesozoic Michigan. A similar dream-intensity characterizes the otherwise urban grit of Greg Bottoms’ two tales, “My Brother’s Education” and “City-Block Protocol,” paired beneath a line of John Ashberry’s in “How Smoothly It Came”.

     Finally, with finely honed blurbs, JR Foley informs readers gentle and ungentle of a few of his (current) favorite reading things.