Alliterative Autobiography [Classroom]
Alliterate often equals anyone can stutter.
—Louis Zukofsky
CLASSROOM
Backpack. Back to school. A bookworm. Late nights book-warmed. Tall tales. Tell-Tale Heart. Stone soup. Mike Fink. A pink eraser. Ser & estar. A star atop the page. A typed page. Cut & paste. Sometimes I’m slow paced. Trace a wave. Cursive. Cursor. Sine curve. Frogger goes kerplunk. We speak & spell. Read & write. I do a rewrite. Rhyme by rote. Hey Diddle Diddle. Digits double. In my textbook I doodle. Sketch pad. Scotch tape. Scratch & sniff. Pear-fect. Berry good. Grape going. Study group. I glue some goop. A great big gooey glob. We spin the globe. Hong Kong. Fiji. Cancún. New York, New York. Blue ink. Half inch. Fluid ounce. I ace the exam for once. Pop quiz. Pop fizz. Scissors. Seat sore. Stegosaurus. From my seat paper planes soared. Chalkboard. I’m stark bored. The chalk broke. Pop Rocks. Pop cans. I can’t. You can. Pop-top. Twist the tab & crush. Orange Crush. Secret crush. Love letter. Origami amore. Already going steady. Valentine-vexed. Doodle-doted. Dimple-dappled. You’re dumped. Humpty Dumpty. We play pin the tail on the donkey. Mountain Dew. Scooby Doo. Dewey Decimals. Dutifully I return The Snowy Day by the due date. Dried dates. Damp day. Windowsill. Pencil. Pen swell. Pen pals. Pentagons. Going, gone. The bus is gone. Let go. Lego. Logo turtle. Or. Are. Oreo. Oregon Trail. Homework. Homeward. Sidewalk. The sign says walk. All week.
Copyright © 2026 by Adam Giannelli. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 9, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“In the 1980s I was a child, and I stuttered. I wonder if I would have written poetry if I didn’t stutter. While many assume that speech fluency is desirable, poetry, one of the most intricate forms of language, is often disfluent. Dickinson’s dashes, Steinian repetition, and Sapphic fragments all echo the pauses and hesitations of the stutter. While I’ve written other poems about stuttering, I wanted this poem to stutter. Since stuttering often occurs at the start of words, alliteration is one of its poetic equivalents. Years later I still stutter, but I really miss the Logo turtle.”
—Adam Giannelli
Adam Giannelli
Adam Giannelli is the author of Tremulous Hinge (University of Iowa Press, 2017), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the translator of Diadem (BOA Editions, 2012), a selection of prose poems by Marosa di Giorgio. He is the recipient of a grant from the Fulbright Program and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.