[Mark A. Mandel <mark@dragonsys.COM>]

American Sign Language has a vernacular genre of acrostic poetry.
In poems of this type, the handshapes of successive signs form a
meaningful sequence, which may be the alphabet or a person's name
(in which case the text is often jokingly slanderous and/or
obscene).

American Sign Language, or ASL, is the language of millions of
Deaf Americans (where the capital "D" refers to sociolinguistic,
rather than audiological, identification).  Contrary to frequent
(and mutually contradictory) mistaken beliefs, it is neither
iconic ("pictorial, pantomimic") nor based on English. 
Linguistic research has been proceeding on it for three or four
decades now, and it has been thoroughly shown to have a rich,
very un-English-like, structure of its own.  The "handshape"
mentioned above is one of the basic formal components of a sign,
along with location, movement, region of contact, and a couple of
others; these can be likened to such basic formal components of a
spoken-language word as vowels and consonants.  Many of the
handshapes of ASL are secondarily used for spelling out
loan-words from English, names, etc.; acrostic poems depend on
the dual functioning of handshapes as elements of ASL structure
and as symbols for letters.

There is no generally accepted orthography for ASL.  Linguists
often use glosses, which represent signs (~= "words") or
morphemes with brief English translations that are more mnemonic
than precise.  I know of half a dozen attempts to create a
useable transcription or orthography of ASL.  Perhaps the best
known are "Stokoe notation", used by William Stokoe in his
pioneering _Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic
Principles_, and the modern "SignFont", created at the Salk
Institute for Biological Research in La Jolla, Calif.  SignFont
has a coding on the Macintosh and the Apple //e; I have a
semi-transparent system for transcribing Stokoe notation
into ASCII, which I used for my dissertation research but have
not published.

Unfortunately, although I did my dissertation on ASL I don't know
any authentic "ABC poems", and I am not currently in close touch
with the Deaf community.  The only ABC poem I know is one I
composed myself, and I don't think that's appropriate for your
collection.
