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Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.

John Keats (1795 - 1821)

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides (556 BC - 468 BC)

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Alphabet Soup – Alphabet Poetry Form Variations

A – B – C – D – E – F – G ~ gee, are these poetry form variations easy – or only deceptively simple?

The simplest variation of alphabet poetry consists of creating a twenty-six line poem using the alphabet, with lines beginning with consecutive letters of the alphabet from A to Z. If you decide to live a bit more dangerously, you could write a twenty-six line poem and begin your lines from Z to A.

This is a contemporary offshoot of the Abecedarian form. Originally it was created in Hebrew and had a stricter form made up of one hundred seventy-six lines grouped into eight-line stanzas. The Abecedarian was considered sacred – some Abecedarians even made the biblical cut.

If you’d like more of a challenge, try creating a twenty-six word poem – using the alphabet (in order, either A – Z or Z – A) as each word’s beginning letter. The challenge here is to create something coherent.

Another version would be to only use vowels (in order, either frontward or backwards) as your beginning letters of each line.

An additional variation would be to create a poem (with any line count desired) using a single common letter to begin each line. For example, if your first line begins with the letter “B,” then every line after must begin with the letter “B.”

For a blending of this variation and an acrostic poem, you could have each stanza’s lines have the same unique beginning letter, but then the stanzas would spell out something. For example (showing only the beginning letter formation):

A…
A…
A…

L…
L…
L…

I…
I…
I…

V…
V…
V…

E…
E…
E…

Finally, my favorite version is the one where you take a letter of the alphabet and study it. What does it remind you of? Does an “o” make you think of a perfect pearl plucked from the sea? Perhaps you take the point of view of a mugging victim and that “o” is all they can see – even long after the crime.

To answer the question posed at the beginning: Are these poetry form variations easy – or are they only deceptively simple? The answer is both yes and no. The forms are relatively simple, but the challenge, as always, is to create density (layers of meaning) with each word and with each line.

Theme: Some of my favorite entries (in no particular order) to the Quotation Inspiration contest. It was a difficult contest to judge - job well done to everyone!