Newspapers and magazines are a great mine for story ideas. To clarify, I don't mean taking a news story verbatim, and fictionalizing it. The story writer needs to mix and match, creating the tapestry of a fiction (or poetry) by weaving elements taken from real life news stories and everyday experience.
This could be as simple as a line of quoted dialogue sparking an idea for a speculative story, or taking elements of a crime news piece and threading it within an existing plot structure to create a points of conflict and resolution.
Coleridge described the imagination as a harmonizing and synthesizing power that takes disparate elements and makes of them a satisfying whole. This also describes the job of the writer, to piece together a maelstrom of elements whirling in their subconscious, calming the storms, to pull it all together into a unified story.
Newspapers and magazines hold a tone of potential for inspiring creative writing. An interesting writing exercise is to buy a newspaper that you usually wouldn't read, find a story that is interesting that you don't agree with and imagine yourself in the mind of an avid reader. For example, perhaps the newspaper is of an opposite political affiliation to yourself. Or maybe it is a tabloid and you only read broadsheets. The aim of this exercise is to get into the mind set of a character that is far from your experience of the world. To completely immerse yourself in their modes of thought, and note down how their internal dialogue would go while reading that story.
You might be surprised how effectively this technique inspires interesting and well developed antagonists for use in one of your short stories or poems.
To read more about the aesthetics of true haiku, and the difference between haiku and senryu, please check out my post: Haiku Vs Senryu - The Aesthetics of Form
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