Hating the "F" Word (Failure): More Abecedarian Poetry

Author:
John Hansen
Updated date:
Jul 23, 2020

John is a freelance writer, ghost-writer, storyteller, and poet. He always tries to include a message or social commentary in his writing

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Inspiration and Challenge

Fellow poet Verlie Burroughs (Snakeslane) recently brought the "abecedarian" form of poetry to my attention in her collection The Road Home Poems and the poem titled A Beach Chirpy Dawn.

Then another wonderful writer Ann Carr (annart) issued a challenge in her article Abecedarian Poetry: What Is It? Origins and Some Examples for other poets to write an abecedarian poem using any one letter from the alphabet to begin each word and write at least two verses about any subject. I did that for my second poem but it was quite random and I wasn't entirely happy with it, so I decided to write another using every letter of the alphabet in order to begin each line, hence: Hating the "F" Word (Failure.)

* The abecedarian is an ancient poetic form guided by alphabetical order. Generally each line or stanza begins with the first letter of the alphabet and is followed by the successive letter, until the final letter is reached. (source: poets.org)

However, like with many forms of poetry there seems to be a number of variants. Sometimes, all words in the poem begin with the same letter of the alphabet, other times each word begins with the next letter of the alphabet until all 26 letters from A to Z are used. Or like my first example, it can be written like an acrostic where the first letter of the first word of each line is the alphabet in order.