NaPoWriMo Quarantine Edition – Exercise 20

Today’s task is not even slightly original to me, although I can’t remember where I first came across it, sorry! But it is a good challenge for those of you who are still with me. And what is the task, I hear you cry? It is to write an Abnominal – a twenty line poem using only the letters found in the name of the person to whom it is dedicated.

The form was invented by Scottish poet Andrew Philip, and the rules are as follows:

1. The poem must use only words that contain letters found in the name of the dedicatee.
2. The poem should be 20 lines long.
3. It should be arranged in two-line stanzas, although other arrangements are permissible.
4. Every two lines, regardless of the stanzaic arrangement used, should contain each individual letter of the dedicatee’s name at least once. It is perfectly permissible to use a letter that appears only once in the name more than once in a single word in the body of the poem.
5. The title must be an anagram of the dedicatee’s name.
6. The opening and closing line should address or refer to the dedicatee in some form, with a strong preference for not using the name. However, the address in line 20 must not be a simple repetition of that in line 1; there must be some difference/transformation.
7. There are no stipulations for line length or other metrical constraints.

Heh heh heh …