Bridegroom, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.
You have captivated me,
let me stand trembling before you;
Bridegroom, I would be taken to the bedchamber.
Bridegroom, you have taken your pleasure of me.
Tell my mother, she will give you delicacies;
my father, he will give you gifts.

Dates to approx 2030BC.

“The Oldest Line in the World” (NYtimes 2006)

The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore house the collected works and lectures on such.

Poe Museum in Richmond Virginia.

“Edgar Allan Poe and Science: A Cosmic Poet” by Juan Lartigue G. concerns Poe’s scientific activities, theories and experiments. Part of a larger site on contemporary Poe studies, The Poe Decoder

“The Purloined Life of Edgar Allan Poe”

Of greatest interest are his letters and, to some degree, his poetry.

Letters and correspondence

The best writing in all of Lovecraft’s oeuvre are not found in his stories, but are contained in the prodigious correpsondence which seem to pour out with ease, like a faucet, without effort — and are generally well-written, insightful and easy to read, no matter what the topic. He wrote over one million letters — the most prolific letter-writer who ever lived?

Not all are published, many originals are sought after, traded and sold at high prices, and the thick volumnes of edited, published reams all have evocative titles: Mysteries of Time & Spirit, O Fortunate Floridian, Lord of a Visible World, Essential Solitude. Fantastic!

This essay on Lovecraft’s letters contains links to many of the published collections. [letters on ebay] [wikipedia]

Lovecraft’s poetry

This online reference to the book, The Poetry of H. P. LOVECRAFT by L. Sprague de Camp, contains several of Lovecraft’s poems (“Jonathan Vos Post, entirely composed & typed 11-12 August 1994”), part of “The Ultimate Science Fiction Poetry Guide.”

For further reference

The Ghazal in the Modern Age

Goethe brought the ghazal to popularity in 19th century Germany, and the form has seen resurgence today. “Ghazal of the Bright Body” by Sarah Sloat (West Branch 2006) is an excellent example of a contemporary English ghazal.

Author of several poetry collections including Sandusky & Back and the 1958 chapbook Cobras and cockle shells: modes in recent poetry.

His work was posthumously collected in Over West: Selected Writings of Frederick Eckman, with Commentaries and Appreciations (National Poetry Foundation 1999). [GoodReads]

Bio page online at The Frederick W. Eckman Collection, MS775, part of the Center for Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University.

Son, Tom Eckman (also a poet), and his infant daughter were both among Charles Whitman’s victims during the sniper attack at the University of Austin on Aug 1, 1966. [pdf] [html]

How much can you do with a flash poem? Carl Sandburg’s famous poem “Fog” is just about it in effect, but not style:

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

A flash poem should be 5 lines or less, unless there’s spacing — Adelaide Crapsey’s “Triad” is getting closer:

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow … the hour
Before the dawn … the mouth of one
Just dead.

Crapsey’s poem is short but, like Sandburg’s, it isn’t a flash — both of them have too much horizontal movement going on, while for a true flash the eyes are always going vertical, scanning down. Here’s one, a true flash, “On the Piscatauqua River Bridge”:

roll down
the window
and
breathe deep
the air,

the cool cold
air of Maine,

the open sea
 air,

fresh and
brisk
and blended
with the sea

You read it and bam, that’s it, no sooner did you start the reading but then the poem ends and hits you in a single flash and there you have it: a flash poem.

Flash poetry in print

I’d like to know if anyone is currently printing, endorsing or promoting flash poetry, and I’m also interested in the historic view.

The Crab Creek Review, an independent literary journal publishing out of Seattle, appears to be close to the aesthetic (they’ve run a lot of interesting, short-short poetry, including a Western haiku by Brendan McBreen in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue).

Madalin Ciortea, a contemporary Romanian poet, has written short “flash” poems including “Flash Poem 5.”

I have a few flash poems in the 2008 issue of Crosscut (Husson College, Bangor, ME). In the 2004 issue there is a great flash poem by Silvana Costa called “Whales at south west rocks.”

Disambiguations

I’ve been calling these fast-scrolling poems “flash poetry” for at least a decade, but in recent years the same term has been used for something else, something completely different — poems published with Macromedia Shockwave Flash software so they appear on a computer screen as moving filmlike animations. That’s something different.

And even Keats talked about flash poetry, although yet another kind — in September 1819 he was referring to “Don Juan” as “Lord Byron’s last flash poem” (see his Letters), referring to what he considered was uninformed, a kind of formal showiness that disguised actual ignorance. (See also Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle by C. C. Barfoot (Rodopi 1999), pg. 74.)