ACROSTIC POETRY, and its effect on Civilization

ACROSTIC POETRY, and its effect on Civilization
pulled from a Lightless Region by Gary Bowers ("claybo")

Nearly every day, for almost two years, my Artful Poet’s Journal has included one or more acrostic poems. As I created them, I came to be curious about the genre, and found that everything from the Bible (psalms 9, 10, 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119 and 145; the Lamentations of Jeremiah) to Cutting-Edge Modern Literature (Ben Jonson, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, and Modesty Forbids) is festooned with such. I have, not endless hours of research in musty library stacks, but a single wonderful entry in the ever-amazing Wikipedia, to thank for this roster. (The curious may see the article in full: view link)

I also rely on Wikipedia for this concise, yet Devil’s-Food-Cake rich, definition:

An acrostic (from the late Greek akróstichon, from ákros, "top", and stíchos, "verse") is a poem or other writing in an alphabetic script, in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out another message. A form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval. A famous acrostic was made on the Greek for the acclamation JESUS CHRIST, GOD'S SON, SAVIOUR which in Greek is: Iesous CHristos, THeou Uios, Soter (ch and th being each one letter in Greek and u is also y). The initials spell ICHTHUS same as ICHTHYS, Greek for fish; hence the frequent use of the fish by early Christians and up to now as a symbol for Jesus Christ.

My Acrostics started simply. Here is New Year's Day, 2007:

N ew Year's Eve, Special Friends,
E nding some dysfunctioned trends.
M usic, jokes, pizza, brew,
O what fun to start anew.

Fans of Finding Nemo will find NEMO on the far left.

By the time I got to mid-year 2008, daily production and urge-to-exceed had resulted in the generation of such as this:



The bookends spell LONGITUDINAL AXIS, and the longitudinal axis spells 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ZERO, which is sort of like playing Dante's Paradiso backwards on your Record Player; or it is, if you wish, a countdown.

I sometimes fit the Acrostic to a special occasion:



Sometimes to the season--this one was made a year and a day ago:



Sometimes I'd celebrate a Hero of mine:



But most often my page and its Acrostic would just reflect what was happening--even if it was as mundane as Muscle Spasms:



As they grew more elaborate, the day came when I wanted to see if there were fellow Acrosticists active on the net. Boy, ARE they! When I thought I was Hot Stuff with the publication of my first Triple Acrostic, I was humbled to find HUNDREDS of Google entries of such, many more sophisticated than my effort. This thrashed me to more complexity. And according to Google, going from Double to Triple, Quadruple, Quintuple, and Sextuple Acrostics dwindlizes listings until, at "septuple acrostic," you get nothing at all.

Until last week! It was then that I published this:



And it was my huge thrill to Google later that day and FIND IT LISTED!

Drunk with power, a couple of days ago I concocted this:



Eagerly, later that day, I googled "octuple acrostic"--

Nothing.

Then I tried "septuple acrostic" again--

NOthing!!! Alas!

I conclude that perhaps, despite Google being recognized worldwide as one FANTASTIC Search Engine, Nobody's Perfect--and I wouldn't be surprised if there are Nonuple, Dectuple, and whateverthehellelevenis-tuple Acrostics out there.

Which, I further conclude, is doable, if one is willing to stretch one's meter out beyond Iambic Pentameter, which is usually my meter of choice.

So, off I go to drown my sorrows? Nah. I WRITE THE BEST ACROSTICS, FOLKS!!! I will KEEP writing them till led quietly away to Moribundsville.

Enjoy!