Offering activities for secondary school students and amateur creative writers, this book demonstrates how teachers can break out of "high culture" stereotypes that make students think poetry has no connection with real life. Part one discusses the essentials of poetry and the roles of poets from ancient oral cultures to the present. The four chapters in this section picture the reading and writing of poetry as a means of introspection through language and also as a way to discover a connection with a larger human community. Demonstrations illustrate how poetry expresses universals in terms of particulars, how it "shows" instead of "tells," and how a "live" metaphor differs from a "dead" one. The entire second section focuses on helping student poets find subject matter for their own writing. The eight chapters are in the form of a do-it-yourself handbook for amateur creative writers. The book's approach (read, respond, play with language) helps students use their imagination for more authentic expression and find subjects and ideas for poems in their everyday lives. Every chapter contains classroom activities, discussion questions, bibliographies of works cited, and student writing models. (KEH)