On Abecedarians
I'm so lucky that I get to work with children and young people as part of my day job. I teach creative writing, which is the best subject, and I won't hear a word said against it! And I'm good at it, too. But, I'm often reluctant to do anything too tricky or "formal" with my young writers, because A. I want them to really enjoy the sessions, and B. the contemporary poetry scene is not that enthusiastic about formal poetry structures. That being said, I've been working with a particular group of teenagers for a while now, through my freelance contract with Writing East Midlands and, a few months' ago, we got to talking about constrained writing techniques. They seemed keen, so I thought I'd set them a challenge! So, I brought in an Abecedarian poem called Hummingbird Abecedarian by Aimee Nezhukumatathil . An Abecedarian is a type of poem where each line starts with a different letter of the alphabet: the first line starts with the letter ...