Another installment of my now-titled "Ibn Gitmo Flarf Cells" (a distracted meditation on Abu Ghraib), for your confusion and enjoyment, at November 3rd Club. November 3rd, 2004, was the beginning of George W. Bush's second term, and for many of us, it was the moment where we fell into a kind of national abyss. In the years following, Iraq quagmire, Hurricane Katrina, political scandals, a housing crisis and an economic meltdown later, we're still reeling.
Ron Silliman, among others, is right to echo those of the Flarf Collective who find it not circumstantial that Flarf found its voice and platform in the post-9/11 landscape; in my generation's short memory (Xers), there hasn't been a darker period in American politics. Perhaps it's for these reasons that "Ibn Gitmo" maintains the idiocy of the Bush era, along with a kind of John the Baptist howl in the background. At least that's what I imagine I hear in those poems.
In the new issue of November 3rd Club, you can read new politically-inflected poems by a host of other interesting poets: SAMIYA BASHIR, OSCAR BERMEO, PHAM BINH, ROBERT BOHM, J. BRADLEY, MICHAEL H. BROWNSTEIN, BRIAN DAUTH, B.L. GIFFORD, ARACELIS GIRMAY, EBONY NOELLE GOLDEN, CORRIE GREATHOUSE, ERIKA JAHNEKE, MIFANWY KAISER, ALAN KING, GEOFFREY A. LANDIS, HEATHER J. MACPHERSON, SYLVIA JULIE MARTINEZ, RAY MCNIECE, PHILIP METRES, RICHARD MODIANO, JOSÉ OLIVAREZ, MARC OLMSTED, IVY PAGE, JOHN PANZA, DEB POWERS, TERRY PROVOST, JERRY QUICKLEY, ANDREW RIHN, JOHN RODRIGUEZ, METTA SÁMA, SKIP SHEA, MARC SOLOMON, JAN STECKEL, LENORE WEISS, PHIL WEST, TONY WILLIAMS and ANDRENA ZAWINSKI.
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