1. POEM SPARKS POEM SPARKS : WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT

2. CONCERNS OF THE HEART. The best poetry ideas are things that concern you deeply. These ideas choose you. They grab you by the sleeve and insist: Write about me! Write about me! Today My Mother’s Heart is Stopped Today my mother’s heart is stopped. The world’s first true sound, my first Music, the steady metronome that rocked me inside her womb-stopped. Today my mother’s heart is stopped. So the surgeon can hold it in his hands, and I cannot find any air to breathe. A thousand miles away from her I hang clean towels on a line. The sheets flash in the light. As a boy I played in the sandbox and watched her lift on tiptoes pinning our clothes onto the line. Later I helped her take them in, and in my arms they smelled sweet like sky, like sun like summer, Mother. A few years ago my mother had bypass surgery. I was terribly worried. I knew that doctors had to stop the heart so they can work on it while it isn’t beating. On the morning of the surgery I was doing housework, when a sentence-Today my mother’s heart stopped- popped into my head. The sentence froze my own blood. This is the poem I wrote about it. - Ralph Fletcher

3. WHAT YOU SEE. You don’t have to go to an exotic place like Maui or Fiji to capture an image or idea. Look at your own world, the bluish veins on Grandma’s hands, sunbeams dancing in a ray of light, the devilish look on your sister’s face. There is poetry everywhere. Here’s an example from a junior high student in New York City: Magazine There is a pretty girl on the face of the magazine. All I can see is my own hand turning the page.

4. WHAT YOU WONDER ABOUT. Fierce wonderings and bottomless questions. These are the haunting inquires that you can live and ponder but never really answer. These wonderful questions make great ideas for poems. Memories, reflections, dreams, fantasies, odd facts-any of these may spark a poem. The rope of my frustrations is swinging in my mind. I think of myself absorbed in the meaning of forever. My own difficulties, They strangle me, when will I realize who I am? I feel my words wanting to come out, I remind myself not to talk the ways I’d like To. No one could have a bolder imitation of myself. Could my feelings deceive me? Could someone push me into the cold sand? I think of myself as my own friend, I talk, I tangle up in my mixed-up head. Am I me? It’s hard to work, for me it’s harder to play. -Julia Salem on the loss of her mother

5. CONCERNS ABOUT THE WORLD. Are you outrages by the pollution of our rivers? The melting of the ice caps? The number of homeless pets in the world? Write about it. A poem is a way for you to speak against the injustice in the world. Use poetry to speak for the powerless and to make the world a better place. Ideas can come from the news, something you’ve read about, or something that you witnessed. The Wild Flight The moon’s lean cresent vaguely illuminated an open field and black forest outline behind. Neck tucked, an eerie shriek, a tall buck, hiding in the stealthy weeds exploding from its knees, out and upward in one great scissoring spasm, pounding field under itself In furious silence. A streak of wild earth, the weight of a large man, its coat of arms, tan with white lines, glowed in the moonlight, surreal and magnificent. I spend days gathering images, the night in reconstruction, sewing dreams like patches along the seams of a diminishing world. -Tom Fletcher