By Bacopa Literary Review 2023 Poetry Co-Editor Reinfred Addo
The abecedarian form is one of those poetry forms that doesn’t always get its fair praise. People love haiku for its tendency to awaken all senses in just a few lines of verse. People love sonnets for the drama inherent in a volta. Other forms also get their fair share of admirers due to the unique twist they add to the exercise of complexity. The abecedarian, in contrast, seems so simple and elementary that poets tend to move past it once we consider ourselves to be “real”, “serious” and “good” poets. Yet, it’s within this deceptive simplicity that, to me, the abecedarian has honor. I dare anybody, from a novice writer to a seasoned Poet, to write a poem whereby each line starts with the letters of the alphabet (line #1 starts with A, line #2 starts with B, etc.) without making the final product read like a bad remix of “A for Apple, B for boy, C for cat…”. It’s hard as hell, ain’t it? Yet, it’s in this challenge that Matthew J. Spireng’s piece, “Two-faced Abecedarian Poem”, thrives. The content, which tells a tale of lying, mimics the form itself. “Arrive in a new town up north and people you meet may quiz/but you don’t have to tell the truth.” Simple, just lie about your past. However, as the voice in the poem continues, the simple becomes complicated.
...Soon it will seem
old hat, lying like that. But be careful
playing the game. A quick
question could trip you up. Like did you meet a certain Raj
running some northern state in India? I
sure wouldn’t envy you if you answered wrong. You might wish
to crawl in a hole, getting
unveiled like that.
To me, an abecedarian takes serious craftsmanship because, more so than a lot of other forms, every single line of an abecedarian has to be solid on its own in order for the whole poem to also get praise. An average or bad line is not able to easily hide amongst the well-crafted ones; it will most often stick out unpleasantly. Also, some forms tend to be more forgiving to what I call “the mushy middle”, whereby the middle of the poem is not quite as resounding as the beginning and/or end. Yet, so long as the beginning and end have weight, the poem will generally compensate for the mushy middle’s shortcomings. Not so for the abecedarian, any part that does not stand on its own will sour the whole poem and take the reader out of the world the poem is trying to build. Spireng is able to avoid weak lines in his poem, which takes some great deft. In this abecedarian, we soon find that navigating life from A to Z is anything but elementary, especially when there’s a secret to keep.
About the contributor: Matthew J. Spireng’s 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize-winning book Good Work was published in 2020 by Evening Street Press. An 11-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also author of the full-length poetry books, What Focus Is and Out of Body, winner of the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award, and five chapbooks.
Matthew J. Spireng was awarded with an Honorable Mention for Formal Poetry in our 2023 edition.
