Alliteration and Alliteration (Prompt)

While looking for the definition of alliteration on google I discovered that it is defined as, “the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.” I feel sad that in the definition of alliteration there isn’t much alliteration, but we must move on because that isn’t what this post is about.

Last semester I was inspired to write a poem that had words that only started with the letter A by the first line of Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa. I haven’t read the book so I don’t know much about it, but once I read the first line I knew that I had to write a poem like the first line of the book.

So the prompt is to write a poem that has words that only start with the letter you choose. It can be A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, but each word must start with the same letter. And if you know another language try alliterating in that language–that would be cool to read! And if this is too difficult then maybe each stanza of your poem can have it’s own letter. First stanza could be A words, the second could be B words, etc. It doesn’t have to go in alphabetical order.

Here’s the first line of Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa:

“Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation.”

Here are more first lines to inspire you to write any kind of poetry:

http://americanbookreview.org/100bestlines.asp

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