The Library of Congress

Have you discovered the Library of Congress yet? This poem is the poem for today, “Aunties” by Kevin Young.   

This is an immigrant boat:  

Creativity can be spurred by any item, but the Library of Congress has an abundance of resources based on history. The list of formats has fifteen types of historical artifacts, including interviews, books, films/videos, legislation, and, well, you get the idea.

It is a compilation of information on what we’ve done as a country. People have spent their careers studying some aspect of life in this country and others, and the repository is available to everyone. Choose a topic, choose a format, and you have your choice of what material you want to use. I once wrote a poem about immigrants from a picture of some great blizzard that piled snow up to the corrugated roof. Now that had to be cold. Yet the women stand in the snow with no jackets, so it must have been relatively warm. If you’ve read Pioneer Women by Joanna Stratton, you have some idea of the struggles people went through when they left their homeland in abject poverty with the hope of a better life. You could even write a story about it.

The next time you are stumped for ideas, just take a digital stroll through these resources — a marketplace of ideas.