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Join teaching poet Asiya Wadud at the Poetry Society for a Saturday workshop geared toward children grades K–5. In this second session, students will focus on acrostic poems.
“In an acrostic poem, a word is written vertically down the side of the page, and each line of the poem begins with the subsequent letter of the acrostic word. Sometimes, we think about an acrostic poem as the word “hiding in plain sight.” Acrostic poems are claustrophobic by nature, since all the details inside the poem build around the acrostic word. The challenge is to stick with the word and construct a world around it without ever mentioning it by name (apart from along the side of the page). What are all the ways to talk about a leopard without ever mentioning it by name? Does it linger in the evergreen shrubs and eventually emerge? Acrostic poems remind us about what it means to stay the course with one idea and to see it through.”
Asiya Wadud teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School, Columbia University, and Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Mandible Wishbone Solvent (University of Chicago Press). Her recent work appears in e-flux journal, BOMB magazine, Triple Canopy, POETRY, Yale Review and elsewhere. Asiya’s work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Finnish Cultural Institute of New York, Rosendal Theater Norway, and Kunstenfestivaldesarts among others. She lives in New York.
