Poetry

Why Write Acrostic Poems?

To have fun and to find other poems

Calm arms companionably teach us stillness

I was thinking about houseplants and also acrostic poems today. So I wrote the tiny acrostic above about a cactus.

What would you write if you wanted to take the letters of “cactus” and start a line with each letter to create a poem? Please share in the comments if you’d like!

Two methods for writing acrostic poems

There are two common ways to set out to write an acrostic (there are other ways, too, but these are the two most common ones!). The first way is that you try to focus on finding one word for each letter of the word you want to spell out in your poem. You don’t even have to make the words into a little sentence like I did — you can just list the words one by one and find the poetry in their sound, feeling, meaning, and so on.

The second common way to write an acrostic is to try and write longer lines that start from the letters in your word that you’ve spelled vertically down the page. In this case, you’re going to “let the line be as many words long as it should be,” in the words of Stephen Dunning and William Stafford as they describe acrostics in their book of poetry writing exercises called Getting the Knack.

I tried writing a poem with longer lines using the word “houseplants.”

How much do I thank you for oxygen when I can’t see a trace of it unless I disturb what always sits on my books and end tables, exciting the dust to make the air pulse through the room like a line on an electrocardiogram as opposed to a heart? Once NASA hoped you could help the astronauts breathe, but scientists today say you’d have to fill all the space.

How acrostics help us as poets

Dunning and Stafford recommend writing acrostics as a way to explore language and ideas using a “playful” form that gives you an external structure that might lead you to making some choices within your poem that offer surprise and even delight.

By setting out your external form to follow, they say that “It’s as if you discover internal form as you’re working. You’re writing along and you notice things happening in the language.” You listen to the poem and figure out “what it wants to be.”

Similarly, I’ve done other writing exercises which start with the external constraint or structure of giving the writer a list of specific words and the assignment to use those words in their poem (or story). This can be pretty fun because the mind has to think in different ways than usual in order to use the words from the list — especially if one or more of the words isn’t a word you generally use.

Acrostics as springboards for more poems

After you’ve drafted an acrostic, maybe you feel your poem belongs in the acrostic form, or maybe you’ve come upon some ideas, lines, etc that you want to develop more freely, and you end up starting a new draft that borrows some of the words and phrases you came up with while writing the acrostic. This version could become something totally different.

I think for my houseplant acrostic, I might revisit it and work with it as a start for something new. I like the idea about a line on an ECG contrasted with the heart itself. I happened upon that idea by thinking about how seeing dust particles floating in the air is far removed from being able to see oxygen itself. The plants are making oxygen in my living room, but I can’t see it like I can’t see my heart at work.

When we let ourselves play with words rather than sitting down with a firm intention to share a specific idea or make a certain point, we can find ideas that we didn’t know we had. We can make unique connections, like going from a plant to oxygen to dust to the heart to astronauts.

Who knows where a poem can go?

For another poem on houseplants (why not?), please see…