Tag: abecedarius

Poem-A-Day April 17: A to Z

Bird

After I fumble another conversation about love, I think,
Bird wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment, played
coy as if everyone didn’t already know what #33 would do,
daggers for eyes, soft hands ready to guide that orange ball
exactly where he said he would. I’ve taken shots before,
fear be damned, and missed more than I made,
gone up and down the court enough to know
halftime won’t fix everything.
I’m bruised, my knee barks, my shot is shit, and I
just need the bank to be open for once, for the glass to
kiss the ball back, softly. I’m always writing to you
like a last-ditch prayer, a heave from halfcourt
moving like a meteor, like I could turn this white page of
nothing into a night sky, these words constellations,
old messages that would say in a hundred different
shapes that I love you. All I ever wanted was Bird’s game,
quietly telling opponents the spot on the floor where he would
rise, after a screen and two dribbles, in the corner like a yellow
sun and let the ball fly. I’m always writing to you
to remind myself that all love poems are about the future.
Under the bright lights of this metaphor, I’m digging deep, not
vanishing when it matters most, to find the heart to take a shot
when the clock winds down to nothing. The X-Man,
Xavier McDaniel, laughs when he tells of how Bird took his heart once.
You already know you have mine when the clock says
zero my no-look mouth, my honey crossover, my silky net.

■
Hello Friends,

Did you notice that the first letter of each line in today’s poem by Tomás Q. Morín spells the alphabet — from the first line starting with A to the last line starting with Z? This is one of my favorite ancient poetic forms, called an abecedarian or abecedarius.

Morín writes about this poem, “Hall of Famer Larry Joe Bird of the Boston Celtics was my favorite basketball player when I was a kid, partly because we both hailed from small, rural towns, and because he played with so much passion and joy. Stories of his confidence are legendary, especially how he told opponents what he planned to do and then did it. An abecedarian also announces to a reader its formal intentions. In keeping with the ancient function of the form, my poem is a hymn, a praise song for love and basketball and our beautiful human hearts that dare.”

If you’re interested, you can read other abecedarians I’ve featured over the years on the blog version of this poem-a-day list, meetmein811.org.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me.

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 17: Abecedarian

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by torrin a. greathouse is one of my favorite poetic forms: the abecedarian. Each line of the poem begins with A, B, C, D, E, F, all the way through Z. (Some of the lines are long, so they may appear to wrap onto a second line on your screen.) The poet cites specific inspiration from an abecedarian by Natalie Diaz, “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation.”

torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. You can find more of her work at torringreathouse.com.

As a reminder, this poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work. For a more official poem-a-day email list, you can always visit the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month.

Enjoy.
Ællen

Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination Before a Diagnosis Can Be Determined

After Natalie Diaz

Antonym for me a medical
book. Replace all the punctuation—
commas, periods, semicolons—with question marks.
Diagnosis is just apotheosis with sharper
edges. New name for a myth already lived in.
For the sake of thoroughness, I have
given until my veins cratered. Tests administered for:
HIV, cirrhosis, glucose, cancer, creatine, albumin, iron, platelets.
I’ve slept for days, wired to machines. Had my piss filtered for stray proteins
just to be safe. Still, inside my body—
kingdom with poisoned wells. I want anything but an elegy
lining my bones. I just want to be a question this body can answer.
My new doctor writes on referral, then another, still
no guesses. A man in a scowl & lab coat
offers yoga, more painkillers. Suggests
PTSD could be the cause—of chronic pain, my limp, of migraines,
quickened pulse & blood-glittered coughs, of seizures
rattling me inside my skin—O,
syndrome of my perfect & unbroken
transgender arm. They checked my hormones too. Yes.
Unfathomable—a suffering I did not choose. Must be gender, this
vacancy my body makes of its own flesh. How I vanish from myself.
We search for a beginning to this story & find only a history of breakage
X-rays cannot explain. Some girls are not made, but spring from the dirt:
yearling tree already scarred from its branch’s severance.
Zygote of red clay that rain washes into a river of blood.

■

Poem-a-Day April 10: alphabet aerobics

Everything I Needed to Know

Ashes, Ashes, we fall on our asses
because the teacher has us. Rodeo
clowns make about as much sense, but then they
don’t graduate from kindergarten
early either. Neither did they have
for their teacher Mrs. Cunningham, whose
grave countenance no kid had the word for:
Her is no bull sitter. Her is squeezing
in chair, knees together. Her is a locked
jaw with lips like a bad ventriloquist’s.
Kind of like a lady Clutch Cargo. Or
like the bride of a Nordic Frankenstein,
motherless but blonde, beautiful, and big.
Nobody here knows she has another
occupation but me. I’m her little
Picasso, her baby ham, and cunning.
“Quit staring, Karl Curtis,” she says, looking
right at me. She knows for a split
second she disappeared and does not want
to reveal her secret identity
underneath. I know she knows I draw some
very naked ideas. Later, when
we go around and tell in tones like the
xylophone’s, girls always first, what it is
you want to be when you grow up, I say
Zorro because a poet needs a mask.

Hello Friends —

Today’s poem is an example of one of the older poetic forms, the abecedarius (or abecedarium), in which each line begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. “Everything I Needed to Know” comes from Karl Elder‘s Mead, a collection of 26 abecedariums of 26 lines each (and 10 syllables per line throughout), which I believe was first published in the Winter 2003 issue of The Beloit Poetry Journal.

Many variations of the abecedarius form have been developed over the centuries, the most prominent of which is the acrostic (a poem in which the first letter of each line spells a word vertically). To learn more about the abecedarius, I highly recommend Matthea Harvey’s article “Don Dada on the Down Low Getting Godly in His Game: Between and Beyond Play and Prayer in the Abecedarius” from the Spring 2006 issue of American Poet magazine. The title of Harvey’s article comes from perhaps my favorite contemporary abecedarius, the track “Alphabet Aerobics” by the Bay Area hip-hop group Blackalicious from their 1999 album A2G — which you can listen to here (lucky you! just hit the play button, then select track 8).

Lastly, today’s poem-a-day is dedicated to Kevin Perry, with whom I have fond memories of writing abecedariums after school at Galloway.

Enjoy.
Ellen

The abecedarius was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 20, 2008.

Poem-a-day, April 20: lips like a bad ventriloquist’s

Everything I Needed to Know

Ashes, Ashes, we fall on our asses
because the teacher has us. Rodeo
clowns make about as much sense, but then they
don’t graduate from kindergarten
early either. Neither did they have
for their teacher Mrs. Cunningham, whose
grave countenance no kid had the word for:
Her is no bull sitter. Her is squeezing
in chair, knees together. Her is a locked
jaw with lips like a bad ventriloquist’s.
Kind of like a lady Clutch Cargo. Or
like the bride of a Nordic Frankenstein,
motherless but blonde, beautiful, and big.
Nobody here knows she has another
occupation but me. I’m her little
Picasso, her baby ham, and cunning.
“Quit staring, Karl Curtis,” she says, looking
right at me. She knows for a split
second she disappeared and does not want
to reveal her secret identity
underneath. I know she knows I draw some
very naked ideas. Later, when
we go around and tell in tones like the
xylophone’s, girls always first, what it is
you want to be when you grow up, I say
Zorro because a poet needs a mask.

***

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem is an example of one of the older poetic forms, the abecedarius (or abecedarium), in which each line begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. “Everything I Needed to Know” comes from Karl Elder‘s Mead, a collection of 26 abecedariums of 26 lines each (and 10 syllables per line throughout), which I believe was first published in the Winter 2003 issue of The Beloit Poetry Journal.

Many variations of the abecedarius form have been developed over the centuries, the most prominent of which is the acrostic (a poem in which the first letter of each line spells a word vertically). To learn more about the abecedarius, I highly recommend Matthea Harvey’s article “Don Dada on the Down Low Getting Godly in His Game: Between and Beyond Play and Prayer in the Abecedarius” from the Spring 2006 issue of American Poet magazine. The title of Harvey’s article comes from perhaps my favorite contemporary abecedarius, the track “Alphabet Aerobics” by the Bay Area hip-hop group Blackalicious from their 1999 album A2G — which you can listen to here (lucky you! just hit the play button, then select track 8).

Lastly, today’s poem-a-day is dedicated to Kevin Perry, with whom I have fond memories of writing abecedariums after school at Galloway.

Enjoy.
Ellen