Thursday, April 09, 2009

Alphapoetically


Write a poem where each word begins with the next letter in the alphabet. (You can also write a paragraph or really long sentence if you wish.)
Andopholus Brown could devour entire fields
Grown heavy in July.
Kranky Luscious munched near open plains
Questing restlessly.
Soon Tontubulous Urvin would xray yellow zebras.
Okay, pretty awful! ;-) More prose than poetry, but the words flowed out more easily than I thought they would. (Feel free to use words beginning with "ex" for X.) It's a nice short exercise since you only need 26 words, and with some work, an actual readable poem might emerge!

Some other ideas:
  • Write from Z to A.
  • Create a 26 word poem with each letter of the alphabet but allow any order.
  • Make a list of alphabetized words or phrases about a subject (animals, your dog, restaurants, Star Trek technobabble ...). You could put 3 per line and challenge yourself to see if you can make them rhyming couplets (each pair of lines rhymes).
There are several here:

Unskilled Poet, and these at the Rock, Waves, Beach blog, all written by Kate An Alphabet Poem, Another Alphabet Poem, A December Alphabet Poem, Knitting Alphabet Poem..

1 comment:

kate said...

Thanks for the shout out. I wrote another one today, but decided not to post it as some of my friends might have read too much into it (it was a little dark).