This article describes an instructional strategy developed to integrate reading and writing. This strategy invites students to use reading, writing poetry, and illustrating as tools to represent intertextual connections to self-selected paired text. It identifies poetic inquiry as the research methodology, discusses intertextuality, and provides a rationale for this instructional strategy. It also shares a brief overview of paired text, discusses poetry as a useful and flexible literary tool for responding to self-selected paired text, and describes different theoretical perspectives on response to literature, highlighting one perspective that underpins this instructional strategy. Samples of student writing that resulted from using this strategy in the classroom are shared. Lessons learned and a lasting thought are provided.