For members of the Poetry Space group which existed until last year I hope we can find an opportunity to meet and discuss these poems in due course.
Alphabet Poetry
The You Can Be ABC by Roger Stevens.
The Utter Zoo Alphabet by Edward Gorey
An English Alphabet Anon
Let’s make a modern Primer for our kinds by Julia Alvarez.
Alphabet poetry involves using the letters of the alphabet (in order) as the basis of the poem. It is used a lot with young children, to aid memory, build vocabulary and teach the alphabet, or can be used as a structure the poet follows to show ingenuity or wit. Here is a typical example from an anthology of children’s verse:
The You Can Be A B C
You can be
an artistic Actor or a brainy Barrister
a clever Conductor or a dynamic Dancer
an evil Enemy or a fantastic Friend
a green-fingered Gardener or a healing Herbalist…
Well, you get the idea. This rather obvious, didactic technique has provoked several “nonsense” alphabet poems where the writer is poking fun at the traditional poem by using invented words or fantastic beasts:
The Utter Zoo Alphabet
The Ampoo is intensely neat;
Its head is small, likewise its feet.
The Boggerslosh conceals itself
In back of bottles on a shelf.
The Crunk is not unseldom drastic
And must be hindered by elastic.
The Dawbis is remote and shy;
It shuns the gaze of passers-by.
The Epitwee’s inclined to fits
Until at last it falls to bits.
The Fidknop is devoid of feeling;
It drifts about beneath the ceiling…
Another variation is using the letters of the alphabet can for their sound, creating sentences by incorporating them into the lines, for example:
An English Alphabet
A for ‘orses
B for mutton
C for yourself
D for dumb
F for vescence
G for police
H for retirement
I for an eye
J for oranges…
(In case you can’t “hear” the phrases here they are: Hay for horses/ Beef or mutton/ See for yourself / Deaf or dumb / Heave a brick / Effervescence / Chief of police / age for retirement / eye for an eye / Jaffa oranges – a brand name.)
Poetry has the ability to play with, and subvert our expectations as an active part of producing meaning. By taking the alphabet poem and its associations of playfulness and learning, innocence and fun, Julia Alvarez is able to create a moving comment on recent history which is really haunted by the question of what kind of world children will inherit, the fact she can find a name associated with brutality, war, murder or genocide for each letter is both sad and disturbing.
“Let’s make a modern Primer for our kids”
Let’s make a modern primer for our kinds;
A is for Auschwitz; B for Biafra;
Chile, Dachau; El Salvador, F is
the Falklands; Grenada; Hiroshima
stands for H; Northern Ireland for I;
J is for Jonestown, K for Korea;
L for massacres in Lidice; My Lai;
N, Nicaragua; O, Okinawa;
P is the Persian gulf and Qatar, Q;
Rwanda, Sarajevo – this year’s hell;
T is Treblinka and Uganda U;
Vietnam and Wounded Knee. What’s left to spell?
An X to name the countless disappeared
When they are dust in Yemen or Zaire.
This is a sonnet, as well as an alphabet poem and is therefore doubly inventive and ingenious. But as with all good writing it’s not the form that is most conspicuous, but the content. In keeping with the sonnet traditions, it ends with a powerful closing couplet.
Christmas, 1970
BY SANDRA M. CASTILLO B. 1962
We assemble the silver tree,
our translated lives,
its luminous branches,
numbered to fit into its body.
place its metallic roots
to decorate our first Christmas.
Mother finds herself
opening, closing the Red Cross box
she will carry into 1976
like an unwanted door prize,
a timepiece, a stubborn fact,
an emblem of exile measuring our days,
marked by the moment of our departure,
our lives no longer arranged.
Somewhere,
there is a photograph,
a Polaroid Mother cannot remember was ever taken:
I am sitting under Tia Tere’s Christmas tree,
her first apartment in this, our new world:
my sisters by my side,
I wear a white dress, black boots,
an eight-year-old’s resignation;
Mae and Mitzy, age four,
wear red and white snowflake sweaters and identical smiles,
on this, our first Christmas,
away from ourselves.
The future unreal, unmade,
Mother will cry into the new year
with Lidia and Emerito,
our elderly downstairs neighbors,
who realize what we are too young to understand:
Even a map cannot show you
the way back to a place
that no longer exists.
Sandra Castillo’s family arrived in the US from Cuba in 1970 and this poem recreates the circumstances of their first Christmas away from home. Christmas, probably more than any other festive occasion for those who celebrate it, is linked to family and place. It is a time that focuses regret and loss as much as it does happiness and togetherness. Castillo, as an adult and a poet, gathers several images of this first Christmas in a foreign land – the Red Cross box, used for storing decorations but also a symbol of their journey, kept by her mother. The Christmas red and the cross seem more ironic than poetic given the practical use found for the container. There are photographs, and costumes – reminders of the contrast between imaginative memory and the photographic, the latter giving no clue to the true context in which they were taken. The artificial tree is weighted with artificial roots and echoes the task the adults have of trying to put down roots in another country. The children, fortunately, are “too young to understand,” although the poem tells another story. For Castillo, the celebration is indelibly linked to loss and exile.
