If William Carlos Williams’s “a poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words” is right, and I see no reason to demur, then written poems are built on a foundation of the alphabet, the visual units from which words are made. Sometimes, poets have been so intrigued by the alphabet that they have made it the foreground of their poems, rather than leaving the letters hidden in plain sight. There’s even a poetic form, the abecedarian, that is based on alphabetical order and dates back to Biblical times. In these poems, the first stanza begins with the first letter of the alphabet and each succeeding stanza begins with the next letter until the full set is completed.
Edward Lear used the abecedarian form on numerous occasion. He employed it to characteristic effect in his wonderfully wry A Nonsense Alphabet. Lear’s range of references for the letters runs from the predictable (B for book), to the odd (U for urn) to the downright zany (S for sugar tongs). There’s also a reminder of a lost world of erudition in his choice of the Persian king Xerxes for the letter X, on the assumption that his readers would not find it out of place among the other 25 more everyday nouns in his set.
Equally characteristic is Hilaire Belloc’s bending of the form to suit his style of humorous sermonising, in his A Moral Alphabet. This is a set of poems in the mode of the better-known Cautionary Tales for Children with morals appended to each alphabetical poem that are both witty and pointed. My own particular favourite is short enough to quote in full:
E stands for egg.
MORAL:
The Moral of this verse
Is applicable to the Young. Be terse.
Spike Milligan’s The ABC is a much-attenuated variant on the basic form, but it’s a clever and inevitably funny run through the alphabet, treating the letters as characters in a story whose ending depends on using the British pronunciation of the 26th letter.
Jan Owen’s Alphabet puts a somewhat different slant on things, using a handful of Greek letters as starting points for short poems that riff on their shapes. Her approach is also rather more serious than Milligan’s, despite the light surface of the writing.
The saying “with 26 soldiers of lead I shall conquer the world” is often erroneously attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Whatever its provenance, for Owen’s fellow Australian Rosemary Dobson it serves as the starting point for a poem that is a reflection on the power of writing itself, which, with wit as its only weapon, sets out to conquer new worlds daily. Peter Porter’s Sleeping with the Alphabet covers very similar ground, except that he invites the letters to join him in his nightly dream adventure, a search for inspiration in which they serve as equal partners.
As this very small, selective list should make apparent, poets have often shown a close interest in the alphabet as both a way of organising poems and as a subject to write about. No one else, however, has got close to the American Ron Silliman who spent the quarter-century from 1979 to 2004 working on a single poem, The Alphabet. Clocking in at just over 1,000 pages, this remarkable abecedarian is a meditation on language, the self and the world – and a working out of the 1970s idea that the personal is political and the political personal. The Y section, called You consists of 52 parts, each made up of seven paragraphs, written a paragraph a day over an entire year.
It’s a long way from Lear to Silliman, but what links these two and all the other poets I’ve mentioned is a kind of insistent awareness of the fundamental importance of the alphabet for any writer and for any written culture. This month’s Poster poems challenge is for you to add your contribution to this fascinating body of work. As the old children’s rhyme almost says, “now we know our ABC, won’t you share your song with me?”
