Writing an Acrostic Poem

Post by Elisabeth TenBrink Kelley, co-founder

     Acrostic poems can be really fun to write, but also kind of difficult. There is only one rule to writing acrostic poems, and that is that it must be an acrostic. An acrostic is usually a couple of words that spell something else, like FBI, except the letters combined actually mean something. With a poem, that could be the first letter of each line, first word of each line, or also the last of the lines. It can rhyme, have meter, all of that, but it isn't required.

     I'll try one of my own. It'll spell "writing".

Wonderful, like making a dream and living through it
Riddle-like in the making, so hard to see an hear
Inspiration comes slow at times, others like rushing rain
Thoughts fill my head, I worriedly begin to fear
Ideas, are they good enough? Why does this bring pain?
Never, though, will I give up, though it bring me tear
For the greatest joy I find, is when at my desk I sit


     This is extremely rough, I wrote it in like ten minutes. If the rhyme scheme seems odd, it's ABCBCBA. It would probably make more sense like this: odds go ABBA and evens go AAA. Anyway, though this is a rather badly-done poem with zero editing (edit your poems, guys, I know it's hard) it is an acrostic. Actually, only almost. You may notice that I forgot about the lettering on the last line, because I was focusing on the rhyme.
     This, of all poem types, probably needs most editing, because you need it to spell something, but it also needs to sound good, and you may have to worry about meter and rhyme scheme as well. Let's edit mine so that it actually spells "writing", rather than "writinf", and try to make it sound better.

Wonderful, like making a dream and living through it
Riddle-like in the making, so hard to see an hear
Inspiration comes slow at times, at others like rushing rain
Thoughts fill my head, I worriedly begin to fear
Ideas, are they good enough? Why does my dream bring pain?
Never, though, will I give up, though it bring me tear
Greatest joy I always find, when at my writing desk I sit

     I really didn't change much, which is why they always say to give your writing a break before trying to edit. Sometimes, months after writing them, sometimes more than a year, I'll come back to read my poems and end up editing them, even thought that wasn't my intention. Anyway, despite the fact that it's still considerably clunky, it is actually an acrostic now.
     I can't wait to see you guys' acrostic poems, I think they're so cool. We'll have to have an acrostic contest sometime.


Elisabeth TenBrink Kelley is an aspiring author and poet. To learn more about her, see our About Us page. You can follow her on Twitter here: @ElisabethGTK.

We have one prose contest open for short stories containing sacrifice, see the guidelines here.