This month’s poetry slam is for the spellers out there. We’ve rhymed this year, we’ve scanned, but have we used spellcheck? We have not. So let’s start. (Fun fact: I once tried to talk my parents into moving because our home state didn’t participate in the national spelling bee so what was the point even of winning the state bee five times? /rbg)
As we pick out each month’s poetry slam, we go through a lot of poetry forms and tutorials. Some we discard because they’re just too long: nobody wants to force anyone to write a 26-line or 26-stanza poem in three days, so you won’t be seeing abecedarian poetry here any time soon no matter how cool its name is. Others, like the Sapphic stanza (I see the three of you giggling in the back row, cut it out, it’s not a content-based form) can be frustrating, nearly brutal exercises in scansion. I kind of want to do that one anyway, but not on the heels of two other scansion-heavy forms.
But then I got my sneak preview of our poetry class. And folks, I’m so excited about this class. (Have you signed up? go sign up!) I haven’t been this energized in a while. The amount of work isn’t overwhelming, it’s accessible, approachable and engaging, it’s full of useful reminders for experienced poets and insights for novices… but most importantly it makes me want to write poetry, and to approach the poetry I have written in new ways.
So with that in mind I went back to my list of poetry forms, and grabbed one I had discarded as too basic, too much like elementary school homework, and too unlikely to generate great works, and I asked “how can I revive this? What rules or games can we add to this form to make it interesting?”
And that’s how this month’s poetry slam became….
…The acrostic
Like the title of both this post and the poem suggest, an acrostic has… something to do with across, right? And something to do with down. In fact, it’s a poetry (or writing) form where the first letter of each line makes a word or phrase when read down, but the poem or prose still makes sense read together in its entirety.
See what I mean? You probably did this in elementary school with your name. Maybe you had to write real sentences, or maybe you just picked out adjectives like
R eal
O rnery
W hat begins with w, what have I gotten myself into
A mess, that’s what
N ever mind.
There. That’s an acrostic, using my name as the “down” segment. See it? Great.
Technically, that’s the only requirement for writing an acrostic. There’s no scansion, no rhyme, no real requirement that it even make sense. And that’s how so many genuinely boring acrostics get written. But then I stumbled across this verse from William Blake’s London:
How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
See how the verse invites you to “HEAR” it, subtly, using the first letters? And how the verse still rhymes and scans That started giving me ideas. So our poetry slam isn’t going to be just acrostics this month. Don’t worry, though: I’m not going to make you rhyme or scan unless you want to.
YeahWrite’s acrostic slam
Since the acrostic is such a simple form, we’re going to use it as a base to play a little game for this month’s slam:
The word or phrase that reads “down” in your acrostic must be the title of your poem, and it must be relevant to the content of the poem.
So you can’t just write an acrostic titled “Legos” whose word down reads CHILDREN and which is about eating an ice cream sundae. But you can write a poem like this:
Caltrops
Come inside, it’s raining
And the trees are not shelter
Let’s play on the carpet, build
Towers, bricked-in worlds, where
Randomly, a doctor
Opens the door of the castle
Play inside, and I’ll put my
Slippers on tonight before I walk here.
So to write this poem I needed three things: a subject, a title, and for the title to read “down.”
I already had Legos on the brain, so I decided to write a poem about what it feels like to step on a Lego at 2am. Caltrops, that’s what it feels like. Little medieval sharp things that they used to put down to ruin the feet of infantry and cavalry alike, the forerunners of today’s spike strips and SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE. That gave me my title and word, and it seemed short enough for a sample poem.
Then I needed the poem to be about actually stepping on a Lego, or at least to imply that I might, but I didn’t want to be that overt about it so I decided to write about how the Legos got on the carpet in the first place. When I was a kid I mostly played outside unless it was really raining, so I thought I’d focus on a rainy day, and on what it’s like to come in and try to play with your toys when you only have a partial set of Legos and you don’t have the right characters to put in what you build, so you end up having the doctor save the werewolf from Rapunzel’s tower. And then of course you don’t clean up… which leads us back to the title and “down” word.
That’s how you breathe a little more life and nuance into something which, like a Lego, can be a very elementary building block. Use those blocks to build bigger, more nuanced poetry. You’re not limited to single words; feel free to use an entire phrase (you might treat the words of the phrase as stanzas but you don’t have to, you can break them up any which way you like).
Do you want your poem to rhyme? Go for it. Add scansion. Do the thing. Just make sure to use the rules outlined above if you’re going to enter your acrostic on our fiction|poetry grid this month!
