Recently I learned about a poetic form called Acrostic in a mathematical journal from 1940 called Eureka.
An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the first letter (or syllable, or word) of each new line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet.
It can also be a type of word puzzle.
Being fond of palindroms, especially numerical ones, I wondered if I could mix the two (acrostics and palindromes) and started thinking up a system for writing a poem in an acrostic way, but where the first letter in each line could be decoded as a positional number in the alphabet. Each number from the lines in the poem would have to end up as a numerical palindrome once concatenated.
A recent conversation I had with an uncle of mine was about the relationship between a the sci-fi-writer Jules Verne and the polymath Fridtjof Nansen. Naturally, if I were to write my very first positional and palindromic acrostic, it had to be about that.
Here it goes:
Sci-fi writer Jules Verne
penned an expedition in 1864Forward was it called
the boat that left the shoreBreaking news after 29 years
Fridtjof Nansen planned something newFrom Norway he left
A polar expedition came trueIn stories like this I learn
Ørjan H. H. Vøllestad
an explorer called Nansen was inpired by Verne
Decoding this poem gives a number for each line, where the first letters’ position in the alphabet ends up like this:
19 Sci-fi writer Jules Verne
16 penned an expedition in 1864
6 Forward was it called
20 the boat that left the shore
2 Breaking news after 29 years
6 Fridtjof Nansen planned something new
6 From Norway he left
1 A polar expedition came true
9 In stories like this I learn
1 an explorer called Nansen was inpired by Verne
Concatenated, this reads 1916620266191 which is a numerical palindrome.
I haven’t checked, but I’m curious if this is the first poem of this kind?
One more thing, when creating a name for this kind of poems, of course the very name itself “Positional and palindromic acrostic” is also positional and palindromic acrostic (P A P A = 16 1 16 1 = 161161).