You can start these 15 poems right now. Besides being challenging and fun to work on, they can lead to some strong poems. For best results, paste the activity into your word processor, or print out a hard copy. Then write quickly and freely, trusting your imagination, hunches, gut feelings. When you finish, read the poem aloud a few times in private. When you're ready, share the poem with a partner or in a small group. Try working on them in your blog, where you can choose to keep them private or share them.

Write a poem addressed to some animal, object, place, or maybe even to a person, whom you don't know or don't expect to read this. You could write to your cat, to a lemon, to a cutthroat trout, to Madonna, to Martha Stewart, to the Empire State Building, or . . ..

Write a companion poem to the apostrophe you wrote for Poem 1, this time writing from the perspective of whomever or whatever you addressed the first time.

You may choose not to reveal the speaker's identity. That is, if you wrote #1 to an eagle, you would now write from an eagle's point of view, but might not let on that an eagle is the poem's speaker.

Make a word photo of someone you know, not a formal portrait, but a quick candid shot of the person engaged in some characteristic activity--your brother playing with his Lego blocks, or your best friend serving a tennis ball, for instance.