1 Today we're going to write some simple poetry. It will be brief. It won't rhyme. You don't have to count syllables. It will be easy—trust me! This brand of poetry is called acrostic poetry.
2 This style of poetry begins with what I like to call the stem. A stem is an up-and-down line, right? In an acrostic poem, the title (or subject) is written down the page. One letter goes on each line; they should all be capital letters. It looks like this:
A C R O S T I C
3 Now, if we left it this way, we would have nothing but a dead stick. That's not poetic! We need to add life to the stem. We can add leaves in the form of words. We will use the capital letters to start the leaves. You can choose to use one word or a string of words—a phrase. As the author, only you can decide which words work best. All that matters is that you choose words or phrases that are about the stem word.
