It's the line ending in J that gets me. I'll almost certainly wind up using "hajj".

Other z-ending words: jazz, waltz, whiz, quiz, quartz, fritz, ersatz, blitz, buzz, fuzz, chintz, hertz, Hafiz, Oz. (I guess you have all the z-ending words you need, but it's fun to come up with a list. And this flu is making me bored out of my skull.)

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And Leibniz! Okay, I stop now.

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Leibniz is what I used, actually...

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You know, I sort of suspected that. Heh.

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Heh indeed. "scion of Leibniz," even.

The first time through I didn't realize you had to END the lines with a particular letter, so the poem that partially wrote itself in my head the other night doesn't do that. And it is resisting spectacularly being buttoned into that particular tuxedo, so perhaps I shall back down and compose a merely singular abcedarian, if such a thing is allowable...

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*KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK* "Open up! It's the Form Police! We know you've got a single abecedarian in there!" Whoops, no, that's just delirium talking.

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v isn't much fun either, and I'm still not happy with what I've got there...

Sorry to hear about the flu!

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Yeah, v is tough too. I was very happy to come up with "Chekhov". Aside from "Slav" I suspect you might be stuck with proper names -- Prokofiev, Tel Aviv, Markov (hey, more mathy goodness), l'cocktail Molotov, Los Bros Flying Karamazov. Or did you think of something I'm not coming up with?

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Or use abbreviations! Abbrev., v.v., c.v., tv, uv, and my favorite, q.v. Etc.

I love cheating. It's true.

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I had used 'luv' which both is jarring and an abomination of orthography as far as my aestheic sense goes. Jarring because of both lack of appropriateness and because of tone. I think I've got too much gravitas of tone at the moment for the form, perhaps.

Perhaps if I go write down the other non-double bits I'll have more luck with this.

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I'm all for jarring, in its place, but I'd have my doubts about "luv" too.

I think you're right about the form asking for something less than gravitas. It's so awkward and chaotic that it seems to me to be suited less for grave, delicate interpersonal-type poems than it is for, say, exasperated poems about what the cat dragged in.

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On the other hand, if you can wring a grave, delicate interpersonal-type poem out of the form, more power to you.

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So the Double abecedarian is just a more advanced form of the "obsessive high school crush poem" form, where in the names of crushed and crushee form the beginning and ending letters of each line?

With Z you do have the option of using various Hispanic surnames as possibilities. I'd think Q would present a bigger challenge.

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There's always "Iraq". My poem (only half-finished) is about a pro wrestling match, so I introduced a run-in from a wrestler called "Roman Esq." I am all in favor of cheating.

Shamefully, I was totally unfamiliar with the obsessive high school crush poem.

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I don't know that there's any shame in not being familiar with the OHSC form, really.

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Heh - so it would seem. I'd not encountered the OHSC form before, probably because of the whole 'j' problem mentioned above.

Q, yes, another hurdle.

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http://www.onelook.com/ lets you do wildcard searches.

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