Hello, again! FlashPøint returns with a celebration of the visual and the verbal work of David Hickman, editor of TROPE: Poetry and Graphics. Featured are a group of biographical poetic palimpsests and an array of stunning computer generated collages, including this issue's cover art. The images evoke Hieronymous Bosch and Hannah Hoch, but David has brought his own genius to them.

     FlashPøint is especially pleased to present in this issue Peter Dale Scott's "A Ballad of Drugs and 9/11." It is, in the words of Joe Brennan, "the embodiment of the kind of work that Carlo and I envisioned when we first started talking about the magazine." FlashPøint #3 contains an excerpt from Scott's "Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000", which "A Ballad of Drugs and 9/11" extends past the Year 2001 in directions eerily consistent with, yet wholly unanticipated in, the earlier poem. "Minding the Darkness" is the concluding portion of a three-volume poem entitled "Seculum," which addresses the actions of the U.S. Government around the world in the last half of the 20th Century. Readers are referred to the note preceding FlashPøint's segment of "Minding the Darkness" for Scott's vision of his project.

     If David Hickman's "poetry and graphics" remind you of another artist/poet FlashPøint has celebrated recently (only two years ago -- no time at all in FlashLand), we are happy to publish one more addition to the Morris Cox canon, "Yule Gammon". The MORRIS COX CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION (1903-2003) appeared in FlashPøint #6.

     For decades Bob Starkey traveled the world with nothing more than the clothes on his back and a rucksack with a few possessions. The result was his "Postcards" often emailed to friends when he had access to the internet. But there were few opportunities to use the internet during the months Bob spent in "Africa." The excerpt here is a reconstruction of events from his travels there.

     Bob also pays tribute to an artist in spectacular stained glass, and a close friend, "Mark Adams."

     While this is hardly a travel issue, another travel piece of sorts, in addition to Bob Starkey's "Africa", is JR Foley's "Visit to Szoborpark," a unique patch of the once (and future?) Socialist Europe. Public art defaced and partly demolished in 1990 has been -- you can only say "lovingly" -- reconstructed and restored in an odd garden spot in the hills below Budapest. That "frontier where the arts and politics clash" has never been more concretely realized.

     Bill Kamens files an imaginary lawsuit, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation v. Mark Kostabi, which unravels questions of what constitutes art through the primacy of the author and the authenticity of the artist's vision.

     There are five new poems from translator and teacher Kent Johnson.

     David Huntsperger's "Aestheticism and Loyalty: Basil Bunting's Response to World War II," deals with Bunting's various attitudes, aesthetic and political, towards Ezra Pound's support of Fascism during the Second World War.

     In apposition, Alan Tucker, riffing on Mauberley, offers "E.P. for his sepulcher." He also celebrates the recent publication of the Collected Poems of Lynette Roberts, author of Gods With Stainless Ears. A Heroic Poem, admired by T.S. Eliot but long neglected.

      John Ryskamp offers an enhanced version of his astonishing poem, "The Twenty-First Century". This expansion of the poem does not displace the original, which appeared in FlashPoint #7: "The Twenty-First Century".

His new work, "Prose Poems", a Briar Patch for cryptographers, is no less astonishing ... to say the least.

But that's not all. Ryskamp also meditates "On the Unity of Twentieth-Century Ideas," which he attributes to the subrosa influence of the "natural" mathematics project on physics, biology, economics, logic, and philosophy.

     Another master of language and typography, Joe Brennan presents 37 new pages of his Joycean polyglot "Work In Progress." The 1700 or so pages of the poem which have been completed have an energy, political commitment and visual elegance way out of the hermeneutic range of today's Neo=Georgians and Navel Gazers.

     Fortunately, the singular success of FlashPøint has not ameliorated Carlo Parcelli's jaundiced view of the contemporary poetic scene or the abominable culture in which it is embedded. This issue contains excerpts from a revised version of his "Eschatology of Reason: The South Tower", which first appeared in FlashPøint #7, as well as 40 pages of the newly minted "Eschatology of Reason: De Rerum Natura." Prof. Parcelli also contributes an essay, "House Nigga/Field Nigga: An Appraisal of American Poetry At The Dawn Of The Twenty-First Century with a Special Emphasis on the Master/Slave Dialectic."

     But that's not all! Poetry is only the smaller target of Parcelli's attack. In "Among The Mammonites: The Super Bowl Of World Extinction: 'How' You Are Able To Think Is Destroying The Planet: Western Epistemology And The End Of The World" he delivers a prose statement of the vision and grievance driving "Eschatology of Reason." The larger target behind the smaller is the entire tradition of Western science and technology, beginning with the ancient/medieval development of epistemology. Parcelli leaves no doubt what he means.

     Before FlashPøint became a website it was a brief, shiny -- nay, glossy -- printed magazine. Helping us launch its publication, Ron Sukenick came down to D.C. from N.Y.C. to give a reading on 17th Street from his subversive, funny, wonderful "narralogues." That weekend he also gave us "The Rival Tradition", which remains one of FlashPøint's all-time most popular pieces. Ron died of a rare, very slowly degenerative disease in 2004, shortly after our last issue appeared. The best way to remember him, we feel, is to let him do the remembering, as he does in his fascinating and very entertaining Down and In: Life in the Underground, presented here by JR Foley in "Down as Up, Out as In: Ron Sukenick Remembers Ron Sukenick."

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     Tell us what you think!

-- JR Foley & Carlo Parcelli