Acrostic Poetry

Remember when you looked at the girl/boy sitting beside you on the school bus, and no longer found her/him icky and gross? You probably wrote poems like the one below while daydreaming about that special person you wanted to share a table with during recess.

When you were a teenager and mistakenly convinced that you were a master on the mechanisms of love, you might have written something more sophisticated.

These are acrostic poems.

Acrostic poems are poems in which the first letters of the lines form a word/phrase/sentence vertically. As expected, the content of the poem has to be relevant to the word/phrase/sentence.

They may seem easy to write because you start the writing process with the first letter of each line already in place. However, this is a restriction as well because you are forced to stick to the structure. If you try to write an acrostic poem that tells a story, especially one in which chronology is crucial, you will know what I mean.

I personally prefer the entire poem to be written as one stanza when the first letters spell more than a single word, so that the reader has to take the initiative to “find” the phrase/sentence.

Acrostic poems tend to be disrepected because they are deemed to be “not real poetry”. I could not disagree more. I used to think that rhyming is the hallmark of first-rate poetry. I now know that rhyming is just another blob of paint on a writer’s palette of linguistic devices.

Give it a try 😀