NaPoWriMo Day 19: Abecedarian Poems

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination B …

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

 Let’s do a free write for 7-8 minutes. Write about an experience you still can’t make sense of or give order to. Don’t try to make sense of the experience in this freewrite (unless you really want to)—just set down the facts, and, as always, try to focus on concrete language, imagery, and events.

Poem: “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination Before a Diagnosis Can Be Determined” by torrin a. greathouse

After Natalie Diaz

Antonym for me a medical
book. Replace all the punctuation—
commas, periods, semicolons—with question marks.
Diagnosis is just apotheosis with sharper
edges. New name for a myth already lived in.
For the sake of thoroughness, I have
given until my veins cratered. Tests administered for:
HIV, cirrhosis, glucose, cancer, creatine, albumin, iron, platelets.
I’ve slept for days, wired to machines. Had my piss filtered for stray proteins
just to be safe. Still, inside my body—
kingdom with poisoned wells. I want anything but an elegy
lining my bones. I just want to be a question this body can answer.
My new doctor writes one referral, then another, still
no guesses. A man in a scowl & lab coat
offers yoga, more painkillers. Suggests
PTSD could be the cause—of chronic pain, my limp, of migraines,
quickened pulse & blood-glittered coughs, of seizures
rattling me inside my skin—O,
syndrome of my perfect & unbroken
transgender arm. They checked my hormones too. Yes.
Unfathomable—a suffering I did not choose. Must be gender, this
vacancy my body makes of its own flesh. How I vanish from myself.
We search for a beginning to this story & find only a history of breakage
X-rays cannot explain. Some girls are not made, but spring from the dirt:
yearling tree already scarred from its branch’s severance.
Zygote of red clay that rain washes into a river of blood.

This is an abecedarian poem, or a 26-lined poem in which each line starts with a successive letter of the alphabet. It’s a fun form to write in, and more challenging than you might expect—finding relevant words that start with J, Q, X, or Z can be difficult, and the restriction on the alphabetized words also makes it harder to craft good line breaks.

This poem, of course, navigates those complexities beautifully. So many different elements of this poem expand upon the central irony of undiagnosable disease, from the opening use of “Antonym”, to the poem’s voice, to the diagnoses that don’t make sense, to the poem’s cataloguing of everything the speaker’s body isn’t.

There some brilliant, gutting lines in this piece. These moments stop me in my tracks:

• I just want to be a question this body can answer.

• Unfathomable—a suffering I did not choose.

• Must be gender, this
  vacancy my body makes of its own flesh. How I vanish from myself.

• Zygote of red clay that rain washes into a river of blood.

That last line is especially beautiful, both for its deft use of a z-word and for its striking final image. The idea that the speaker’s body was born to be pain is, of course, a painful note to end on, but it’s, in hindsight, an inevitable conclusion, given the poem’s subject matter and story.

I think the use of abecedarian here is really strong, not only because of how the poem navigates its formal restrictions, but also because of what form does to a poem. It’s a trellis to hang language off of, a scaffold to build poems with. By giving the narrative in this poem the abecedarian form, the poem is able to make sense of something scattered and chaotic. No, the poem doesn’t end with a comforting resolution, but it does offer an alternate way of making sense, and it leads this poem to a powerful, full-bodied epiphany.

Prompt

Write an abecedarian! You can use your freewrite to start hanging language off of the alphabetical trellis. Focus, first, on fitting the poem inside the form, then pay attention to the finer details—words that work, words that don’t, lines that might need to be broken in different ways, and so forth.

As your draft emerges, you might find a new way of understanding something you couldn’t understand before. Place your trust in the form, and see what it shows you.