Edward Alport is a retired teacher and occasional writer who occasionally gets published. When he has nothing better to do he posts snarky micropoems on Twitter as @cross_mouse. He also moderates the monthly @ThePoetryFloor Twitter writing event.

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Micropoetry and Twitter have become inextricably linked in the cultural universe, and they are about the same age, with ‘micro-poem’ beating Twitter by 2004 to 2006. ‘Micro-poem’, as a term, was coined by W G Sebald in Unrecounted, which was published posthumously in 2004. As Sebald died in 2001 we can assume that the term is slightly older.

The word micropoem (without the hyphen) is not defined in the OED (at the time of writing) but is now used generally to apply to any very short poem. But ‘very short poems’ have been around for as long as poetry has been around and succeeds, or doesn’t, for very much the…