My Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics includes a short entry on acrostic poetry. The form is as old as the Psalms (119), and older perhaps. Acrostic has been used to encrypt a message, especially if the acrostic part of a poem comes in the middle of the line; and it has been deployed to celebrate a loved one, a ruler or patron. It has been used by poets to self-identify, without actually having to write I am here and I wrote this! the way painters sometimes paint themselves unobtrusively into a scene.
Acrostic poems make for fun but challenging exercises (alert!) that require us to hue to a technical formula while still making a work of art. The form isn't taken all that seriously by most writers; it is light verse, usually. A quick google search of "acrostic poetry" yields mostly games for kids. A search of the Poetry Foundation this afternoon turns up one poem labeled as an acrostic. You can find discussion and examples of acrostic here on the Academy of American Poets web pages.
Acrostic poetic structures are various. The most common, of course, is the initial acrostic where the first letter (or word) of each line is part of a word, name or expression when spelled out vertically. The poem linked above at the Poetry Foundation site is an initial-letter version that spells out ELAINE IN AUGUST. Other versions include mid-line letters or end-line letters (or words); the first letter (or sometimes word) of a stanza. (The same can be done in prose; for instance, the first word or letter of each paragraph.)
Acrostics are, basically, linguistic and textual problems to solve; they are puzzles to build and to discover/interpret. For us at W@1, they're just fun and challenging--a good poetic exercise. So . . .
I will send to each of you a name spelled out vertically. Each letter in the name will represent the first letter of each line of the poem you will write. You will recognize the name. In fact, you will know the person whose name you receive.
Your challenge will be to write a poem--a truly serious poem, not a clever rhymer or a piece of fluff--using that name as your launch pad. The poem can be about whatever you wish, about the person whose name you are working with, or anything else that stirs your imagination. When I say yours should be "a truly serious poem," I don't necessarily mean a piece of melancholy or high philosophy or polemic or metaphysic or even that it should be "sober." I mean that it should be a poem--your best effort to render language artistically, lines that move and are moving, images that reach out and grab, metaphors that kickstart or arrest, and so on.
Have you ever read
A poem that invites you to
Veer off in strange,
Enticing directions
Fearlessly, and puts you
Under no obligation
Necessarily to return?
Acrostic poems make for fun but challenging exercises (alert!) that require us to hue to a technical formula while still making a work of art. The form isn't taken all that seriously by most writers; it is light verse, usually. A quick google search of "acrostic poetry" yields mostly games for kids. A search of the Poetry Foundation this afternoon turns up one poem labeled as an acrostic. You can find discussion and examples of acrostic here on the Academy of American Poets web pages.
Acrostic poetic structures are various. The most common, of course, is the initial acrostic where the first letter (or word) of each line is part of a word, name or expression when spelled out vertically. The poem linked above at the Poetry Foundation site is an initial-letter version that spells out ELAINE IN AUGUST. Other versions include mid-line letters or end-line letters (or words); the first letter (or sometimes word) of a stanza. (The same can be done in prose; for instance, the first word or letter of each paragraph.)
Acrostics are, basically, linguistic and textual problems to solve; they are puzzles to build and to discover/interpret. For us at W@1, they're just fun and challenging--a good poetic exercise. So . . .
I will send to each of you a name spelled out vertically. Each letter in the name will represent the first letter of each line of the poem you will write. You will recognize the name. In fact, you will know the person whose name you receive.
Your challenge will be to write a poem--a truly serious poem, not a clever rhymer or a piece of fluff--using that name as your launch pad. The poem can be about whatever you wish, about the person whose name you are working with, or anything else that stirs your imagination. When I say yours should be "a truly serious poem," I don't necessarily mean a piece of melancholy or high philosophy or polemic or metaphysic or even that it should be "sober." I mean that it should be a poem--your best effort to render language artistically, lines that move and are moving, images that reach out and grab, metaphors that kickstart or arrest, and so on.
Have you ever read
A poem that invites you to
Veer off in strange,
Enticing directions
Fearlessly, and puts you
Under no obligation
Necessarily to return?
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