Acrostic Poetry

By Dearborn - American Broadsides and Ephemera, Series 1, Public Domain

 An acrostic poem is a poem in which the first letter of each line, read from top to bottom, makes a word, phrase or sentence. This can be a fun way to create a poem through yet another kind of restriction--in this case, a restriction on what the word beginning of each line must be. 

Let's say, for example, that I wanted to write a love poem to my wife, Anna. I could have an acrostic of

TROY LOVES ANNA

The weight within me has been borne by you,

Rewarding in this constant rain of sun

Over the clouds, the clouds that blanket through

Your warmth, your warmth which past this pain has run.

Low though I go, I can but go so low

Out in the wilderness where all the snakes,

Vipers have struck, but shed their skins--we know

Enough to know we'll be reborn. Cool lakes

Shall baptize us and, cleansed, we both shall grow.

A warmth has broken through--the stones will warm,

Now we shall settle in the sun together,

Naked to all the world in our new norm

Of love resisting venom, drowning, weather.

If we really wanted to challenge ourselves, we could even do an acrostic with a telestich (the last letters spell out the word), to do a double acrostic. Here, we could do 

TROY (first letters of the lines) and ANNA (last letters of the lines)

There's nothing in the lovely realm of flora

Rewarding to my eyes as what I've won

On that July where us truly'd begun--

You are my ever-shining, bright aurora. 

For my money, using acrostics in a free verse poem would "cheating" simply because that would make your task much easier. And where's the fun in that? The point of all constraints is precisely that it's supposed to make you wrack your brain, twist and turn your words and sentences, until you find something that fits. The more restrictions you have, the more twists and turns you'll have to make, and the more likely it will be that you'll have to find something you wouldn't have otherwise thought of on your own. And that's when your poetry truly gets interesting. 

Of course, with something like acrostic poetry, there are inevitably going to be those who object that you're simply engaging in word play, that it's not serious. Well, what else is poetry in general but word play? And what else is play than a nonserious thing done seriously? An acrostic poem is or can be as serious as any other form. More, you can add layers to the poem, having a serious sentence read down in an otherwise light poem, or vice versa. Especially if you don't point out that the poem is acrostic. Just let your reader discover it. 

Of course, there are any number of other things you could do to play around with the idea of acrostic. You could have the first letter of the last word of each line spell out a word. You could have a triple acrostic in which the first letters of the first word, the caesura, and the last word could each make a word. Or you could write a triple acrostic with the last letter of the last word spelling out the word. One could even invent a kind of alliterative "acrostic" in which the alliterating letters are what spell out the word(s) in question. 

I'm tempted to try, to tip-toe these terms

Round rhythms and rhymes that reel through the real,

On over through other orbiting orbs

Of yesterday's yearnings for yokes of yore.