Many of my poem ideas come out of real life. When my daughter Maddie had two teeth pulled, she put straws in the empty spaces and started kind of barking. She looked just like a walrus, and I wrote a poem about it. A mere 6 years later, my poetry collection comparing kids to animals (alas, minus the walrus poem, which wasn’t that great) is now out. Clarion published Stampede! Poems to Celebrate the Wild Side of School in April. Here’s one of the poems from that book, inspired by my memories of BOTH my daughters cutting their own hair when they were little.

Tomorrow Is Picture Day?

I’m missing three teeth, there’s a scratch by my eye.
I trimmed my own bangs—and I cut way too high.

My dad says a butterfly’s blooming in me,
but a hideous caterpillar’s all that I see.

–Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved

And as I go through the day, I get ideas for poems constantly.

But then I was asked to speak to a writing class (of adults) about how I read as a writer. Specifically, how I read as a poet. As I prepared for this talk, I realized that I often get ideas for poems from other people’s writing.

Here are a few examples.

While reading The Mephisto Club, a mystery novel by Tess Gerritsen, I came across the following passage:

She walked through the piazzetta and headed up the narrow alley leading to Via di Fontebranda. Her route took her toward the town’s ancient fountain house, past buildings that once housed medieval craftsmen and later slaughterhouses. The Fontebranda was a Siena landmark once celebrated by Dante, and its waters were still clear, still inviting, even after the passage of centuries. She had walked here once beneath the full moon. According to legend, that was when werewolves came to bathe in the waters, just before transforming back to their human forms. That night, she’d glimpsed no werewolves, only drunken tourists. Perhaps they were one and the same.

Ding! Ding! Ding! The parallel of drunk people sobering up and werewolves changing into people totally catches my imagination. This would be an adult or teen poem, and I haven’t written it yet. But the excerpt has gone into my Poetry Pot until I’m ready to write about it.
Here’s an idea I got from an existing poem. I was listening to an audio recording of Robert Graves reading “To Juan at the Winter Solstice.” The quality was poor, and I could barely understand much of it. But two lines caught my ear:

How may the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love

These two lines made me think about what we are willing to trade our lives for. And so often, it’s not the glory-bound things we give our lives for. It’s the daily drudge. We literally trade our lives away when we spend our time doing inconsequential things like gossiping or worrying about what other people think about us. This is a topic for a teen poem, I think, and I’ve got some phrases rolling around my brain, but no complete draft yet.

But really, I DO sometimes actually write poems inspired by other works. I was reading Song of the Sparrow, a lovely novel in verse by Lisa Ann Sandell. I came to this part:

The moon plays
on the ground in pools of
ghostly light.
As we walk between the trees,
their bark peels away
from the trunks
like scrolls of silver parchment.

–Lisa Ann Sandell, all rights reserved

Isn’t that gorgeous? I love birch trees, and this idea of them revealing themselves and serving as scrolls, messages…I thought that was wonderful. I stole that idea and wrote a haiku:

Birch Bark

Curling silver scrolls—
Secret love notes to the world—

Peel back, exposing heart

–Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved

Another way to steal a poem is to try a found poem. I get a magazine from my state’s Department of Natural Resources. I was reading an article in the kids’ section about migration. I decided to try a found poem from part of the article about wolves.

From this article by Tom Anderson, I picked out words I liked and then looked to see what kind of poem I could make from them. Here’s what I came up with:
Finding Home

gray territories
cover vast miles

do not
migrate

hunt your
boundaries

learn your way
home

claim

howl

–Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved

These are just a few of the ways I create poems that are inspired or filched from ideas or words that I read. I think every poet does this. It’s how we process the world around us, including the things we read.

What’s the last book or article or story that you read that engaged your heart or mind. Can you write a short rough draft of a poem inspired by that? It doesn’t have to be exactly about the same topic. Just think of where it makes your mind leap to, and write a bit of a poem about where you landed. If you’d like, share your poem in the comments and let us know what the inspiration was. I’d love to see what y’all come up with!

Thanks Laura. You can learn more about Laura by visiting her website.