ISSUE 01 • A Chaos of Deep Passion

June 15th, 2010

Thank you for visiting this website for the inaugural issue of Dark Eye Glances, a new quarterly online journal of dark poetry and lyrics that will also be published annually as a print anthology.

In addition to being a dark fiction author and poet, I am also the producer of the Edgar Allan Poe 200 Project which debuted in 2008.

One of the initiatives of the EAP 200 Project was Poe International, the official site of the International Edgar A. Poe Society.

That’s why, as a tribute to Poe’s own dark poetry, it made sense to steal one of his many great verses for the title of this publication which owes its origins to Edgar A. Poe’s To One in Paradise:

And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams-
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.

Did you know that in an earlier draft of To One in Paradise, Poe had originally written the third line above as “where thy grey eye glances”? As readers we sometimes presume that the words we see on a magazine page, in a book or on a website, were originally written in their final perfect form? It’s often a bit jarring to see manuscripts of famous poems with various corrections and different words than the ones so familiar to us. Like the Wizard of Oz, poets like to hide behind the curtain as they pull the levers because if readers saw what efforts and struggles went into a poem, well…some of the magic might be lost, and the poet might not seem quite as supernaturally inspired. That’s especially true with dark poetry, which often relies on a kind of mystique.

One of the objectives of Dark Eye Glances is to bring the authors forward, tell their stories, and then share their poetry. It’s terribly interesting to find out about an author’s background, experience, artistic goals, personal philosophy and beliefs before you read their poetry because it does give you insight into their writing. This, of course, runs contrary to the post-modernist theory of Reader Response Criticism, which interprets literature from the perspective of the readers’ own experiences of literature.

Another important objective of this journal is to revive traditional and experimental techniques for employing rhyming and metrics in poetry. I’m what you might call an innovative traditionalist because I want to reclaim the impact that lyrical poetry had on world culture before the post-modernists declared it antiquated and deemed most modern rhyming poetry “doggerel.” The ultimate result of that exercise was to drive literary poetry into the ivory castles of academia and out of popular culture. Now most people can recite the lyrics to their favorite pop songs, but cannot recite even a stanza or two of literary poetry. And, of course, most song lyrics…rhyme.

Yet I would not become dogmatic about it. Most of my own poetry over the last 10 years or more has been free verse rather than rhyming, lyrical poetry, but I am still not afraid to use an unexpected rhyme at the right moment in a non-rhyming poem, and one of my most important artistic objectives as a poet are to explore the use of rhythm and repetition in my poetry. Dark Eye Glances will tend to publish poetry that uses rhyme and metrics for a strong effect, so that’s the kind of poetry you will usually find here, but we will also consider free verse and experimental poems, especially if we see that the writers are willing to explore rhyme and rhythm within the structure of their work.

We hope you enjoy the debut of Dark Eye Glances, and by all means tell us what you think of the poets and their poetry within. Or, if after reading the contents, you think of other excellent poets you’ve read (yourself included) who write dark poetry with rhyme and rhyme—send us their names and we will consider their work for future issues. Unlike the old school, play-hard-to-get attitude of other publications who expect writers to come a-courting, we are not too proud to actually contact poets we like (or those our readers like) and invite them to contribute to Dark Eye Glances.

Now that’s revolutionary, isn’t it?

Garth Von Buchholz
Editor & Publisher
Dark Eye Glances