Ryan, I’m sorry that it took me so long to reply. Truth is that I agonized a little over your challenge. You came at it quite analytically & in the debate with Michael, I stayed close to the murky waters of my own imagination. My earlier point was made intuitively rather than inquisitively. I’m neither a poet nor a true flash writer (odd as this may seem from looking at my published work). My thoughts are probably useless because I’m a flash fiction idiot savant. I came to flash by accident and not because I read anyone who did flash well. I heard about Lydia Davis from you (got “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant now and like it). I’ve got to check the others out. Of course I know Borges and Cortazar and other masters whose writing often decomposes into flash-like fragments (or is composed that way, as in Cortazar’s case). For me flash has become a mode of working rather than a self-sustained form. I can talk forever about the making of flash, of course, but if I did the result would read like Gertrude Stein’s “The Making Of The Making Of Americans” (which I love).

Aaaaaanwaaaay….It looks as if the earliest (pre-modernist) example of a prose poem is Charles Baudelaire’s “Paris Spleen”— roughly a century earlier than Edson (I'm indebted to Sam Rasnake for telling me about "Paris Spleen" in the first place). Baudelaire has got interesting things to say about the form (in a letter to A. Houssaye). Some are a little overheated, perhaps typical for that period and style:

«Who among us has not dreamed, in his ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and jarring enough to be adapted to the soul's lyrical movements, to the undulations of reverie, to the twists and turns that consciousness takes?»

He seems to suggest the prose poem as a form more suitable to what would later be called stream of consciousness. Elsewhere he talks enthusiastically about the freedom of the prose writer:

«The author of a story has available to him a multitude of tones, of nuances in language, tones of reasoning, of sarcasm, of humor, all of which poetry repudiates, and which are kinds of dissonance, of outrages upon the idea of pure beauty.»

All of which confirms that the prose poem at least originally, when compared to (most of) 19th century poetry, seems to allow the poet certain liberties and tools “of a story”. So far, so good.

What now, about the prose poem vs. flash fiction? Your inference was that flash fiction is “centered around character” and I fully agree with that, even with your suggestion that these flash characters could be expanded into a novel.

This is exactly the way I work at current, though technically it’s rather the fictional character himself that does the expanding and exploring: all I have to do is, on the page and in my mind, provide more space than the measly 100-1000 words that are typically allowed him.

Let’s look at an example. The editor (Sam Rasnake, an accomplished poet) who published “Cahiers du Cinéma” in his magazine Blue Fifth Review insisted on calling it a prose poem rather than flash fiction. (I challenged him on it and he held firm.) The piece consists of 9 paragraphs. At first it seems to satisfy your criteria of “more contained” but at the same time, every section contains at least one new character: a woman from Norway, parachuting soldiers, a love in South America, a trans-sexual postdoc, a wife, a dead friend…and only in the end the narrator, a vampire, narrows the story down to himself and his philosophy of life. It seems to me that every section could be turned into a novel or a longer narrative. That every character (besides the narrator) is encapsulated enough to warrant unfolding and growing beyond the confines of its paragraph. Clearly there’s a story here, too. Yet, a connoisseur sees it as a poem.

I’m not sure I’ve come very far here or added anything to what you’ve said (apart from my own example)—the difference between prose poem and flash fiction still somewhat eludes me. Perhaps the confusion is owed to the fact that we live in thoroughly experimental, postmodern times where nobody likes to find himself stuck in a specific structural or formal corner anymore. This stuckness may have meant comfort and certainty to our literary ancestors, while today we only see it as narrow. As a maker, I’m personally more interested in telling stories than in broadening the canon or innovating.

As a working hypothesis, at the end of these considerations, it seems to me as if perhaps prose poem and flash story are indistinguishable as such, but look different depending on the direction of approach: when you come at the same text from the poet's side, you see a prose poem (the freedom Baudelaire talks about); when you come at it from the novel, novella or short story, you see a flash—distinguished mostly by its brevity.