Often when teaching creative writing to grade school and middle school students, teachers encounter two problems: students state that they do not have anything to write about, or students keep their poetic voices quiet and imitate the examples that they are given. If students are encouraged to mentally create images of poetic forms and to write poetry within loose versions of the forms, they are more receptive to poetry. In addition, when students visualize the forms before they write, they have a sense of where they are going before they get there. In order for students to see poetry as living, breathing words which have a connection to them, educators need to give students examples chosen from the middle of the poetry spectrum. Students in the third through eighth grades respond best to quatrains and sonnets. The quatrain works well as an example to use to explain how stanzas can create a poem. If teachers explain to students that what goes on within the sonnet is as important as, or even more important than, its formal elements, they can encourage students to see that the message within the sonnet is what is most important. Seeing a visual representation of the poetic form allows students to visualize what a poem looks like; they then have a schema to tap during their creative process. Students can then be given a sample poem to discuss in small groups. (Three figures are included.) (MG)