Acrostics

To make an acrostic poem, write a word vertically and then use each letter to begin a line. Example:

Marty,
I love you and like you and
Kiss you and go to the park and
Eat grapes with you.

Michael Busby (1st grade)

There’s more to say about the acrostic as a form than there is about many of the other exercises, but you needn’t explain everything. Limit your warmup to fifteen minutes or so and bring out some of the points later as they become pertinent.

As part of the warmup, you can name various letters and ask students to say the first word (starting with that letter) that comes to mind. You can move from there to a sort of acrostic “exquisite corpse”––you have a word in mind and one by one write down the letters, getting word-responses from the class as you go. You’ll probably end up with playful nonsense, like:

Baby 
Unleashes 
Silicon 
Hands

which encourages associative freedom. Another simple warmup is to use someone’s initials: for example, JFK becomes Jelly Kissed Harmonica.

Of course, you may skip these warmups and simply show the class what an acrostic is. Write one on the board. Then write the “spine words” of several more (even a dozen or so) and read the acrostics aloud, pointing to the letters as you go. You might suggest that what an acrostic is is tilting a word on its side and “seeing what spills out.” 

Talk a little about whatever aspects of the form might be relevant to your students:

• Linebreaks can occur within phrases, at unlikely points; this can lay stress on words otherwise lost in the flow. For example,

Creature who
Approaches you when it wants
To

emphasizes the unexpectedness, the independence, of the feline’s movements, more than if the poem were only one line (“Cat: creature who approaches you when it wants to”).

• There are no requirements for rhyme, meter, line length, or meaning.

   

• Writers can make their poems relate to the spine word or not, or have the poems “close to” or “distant from” it. Usually the spine word will influence the other words:

Pandora 
Opened 
Everything 
To 
Realize 
Yes! But...

Playing
On the swing
Eating
Taffy
Running through the
Yard

Populate the cosmos with
Odd rhythms from Planet
Earth.
Take your poems to NASA. They
Read, launch, and make
You an intergalactic seer.

Mike Crosby (teacher)

• Since the line is emphasized by the form of the acrostic itself, mixtures of long and short lines stand out musically, and thus semantically. A very short line after a series of long ones, or vice versa, feels different.

Ask the students to pick their own (interesting) words and each an acrostic or two.

These may well be instructions enough, but here are some additional points:

• With young or beginning student poets, suggest there’s a magic to making poems out of one’s own name. (See NAME-LETTERS STORIES.)
• You can use a series of words for the spine.
• You can use the whole alphabet (for that encyclopedic feel).
• You can spell the spine word from bottom to top.
• You can make a “ragged” acrostic by allowing some letters to stick out to the left of spine word.
• You might skip lines (of paper) when writing down your spine word so you’ll have room for long poem-lines.
• It’s interesting to have all the students write acrostics based on the same spine word.
• Students can write repeated acrostics of the same word (it’s amazing how ideas keep kicking in for this one).

Collect and read. (When reading student acrostics aloud, try announcing the spine word beforehand and reading with gestures and pauses, to emphasize the form.)

People have written acrostics for thousands of years. There have been many elaborations of the form throughout history––in the Bible, and in works by Plautus, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Poe, and others. Poets have also tried having the end letters of each line spell something vertically, or even having a spine word down the middle of the poem, or diagonally.

Basically, it’s a form with an unusual degree of combined suggestion and freedom.

Is your class studying Lewis and Clark? Electrostatics? Triangles? Sentence structure? Have them make acrostics of key words from the subject.

See also, ACROSTICS-FROM-PHRASES; NAME-LETTERS STORIES; ON QUICKIES: ICEBREAKERS AND FILLERS.

Fly flower
Lace lin
Opened guard
Wild animals
Earth snake
Round and round.

Annah Dahle (2nd grade)

A man, a woman
Dumbfounded
Ultimately curse
Love,
Time and 
Space.

Anonymous

A 
Cord that 
Reaches 
Over the  
Sun 
That  
Is as beautiful as a  
Crocus.

Jonathan Benton (3rd grade)

Molehills covering an 
Old  
Optic mass going 
Nowhere in particular, 
Swinging around.

Jennifer Peck (7th grade)

eSsence of the  
bEst sneaks 
aCross 
tO 
aNother 
aDiction.

Michael Smith (10th grade)

Labradors are chasing 
Oxygen toward the  
Village and making an  
Earthquake.

Aaron Ferrel (4th grade)

Anonymous and 
Numerous 
Turtles 
Intelligently 
Devour 
Insects that have been 
Searched for, for 
Eternity, 
So that they may gain the protein 
That will 
Allow them to 
Become superior to the 
Lonesome creatures that dwell on Earth 
In protecting caves, 
So the Earth can once again be 
Held captive by these 
Manhunting creatures. 
Earth will become a  
Natural and more peaceful place 
To live on, 
Although the humans may fight until the last 
Refugee stands 
In his battle tracks. 
And on this planet there is 
No possible chance the 
Inferior two-legged creatures can  
Survive; it is a  
Manslaughter.

Beau Weber (8th grade)