Calling Vogon Prostetnic Jeltz

[unixronin]

....now acrostics are apparently being considered to be poems for school homework purposes.  Give me a break .... an acrostic is a word puzzle.

I suddenly find myself with a new-hatched dread of waking up one day to find that "Cat, dog shit oops I ment cow" [misspelling intentional] is now considered a poem.  The criterion of poetry seems to have dropped to "If someone, somewhere, regardless of whether or not they know anything about poetry or even about grammatically correct English, says it's a poem, then it's a poem."

Come back, Vogons, all is forgiven.  At least the "freddled gruntbuggly" poem had ... something.  (I'm not certain what it was, nor whether I really want to find out, but it had something.)

Oh freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!

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Clarification:  I am taking issue not with the idea that an acrostic can be a poem, but with the idea that merely being an acrostic is sufficient on its own to qualify a collection of words as a poem, which is about as silly as saying that having doors is sufficient to classify an object as a car -- the quality "has doors", as a distinguishing attribute of car-dom, is neither necessary, nor sufficient.  So it is with "is an acrostic" and poetry.

Comments

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

I respectfully disagree. An acrostic can be a poem, but just the fact of being an acrostic doesn't make something a poem.

This acrostic about George Washington (http://www.geocities.com/stlaasr/article-11-2002.html) isn't one I remembered from class, but it does show that acrostics have been considered poetry for at least 200 years. And this article at About.com (http://puzzles.about.com/library/weekly/aa000117.htm) lists an example of acrostic poetry dating back to the 1500s.

And an article at a Worldwide Church of God site (http://www.wcg.org/lit/bible/poet/psalms3.htm) claims that acrostic poetry even appears in the Bible:

Psalms 37, 111 and 112 are wisdom psalms with an acrostic pattern; each verse begins with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This pattern made the psalms easier to recite.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I respectfully disagree. An acrostic can be a poem, but just the fact of being an acrostic doesn't make something a poem.

My point exactly (though I evidently didn't state it clearly enough). While an acrostic can be a poem, being an acrostic is in and of itself neither necessary nor sufficient to be a poem.