It's definately possible. You would need to make sure each particles have a reallly short life since the sparks fly off really fast. Here's a particle shape that you can try for the sparks.
http://pi.shockingtales.com/shapes/sparklers.jpg
I had some footage of real sparklers captured, so I had some nice reference to whip this up, though it's not perfect. It will only open up in version 3.01
http://pi.shockingtales.com/ipf/sparklers01.zip
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