But in my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
A lot of oral poetry is keyed into our heartbeat. The words you hear at your mother's lap. The utterance of words in the right order can excite, be thought-provoking.
Only thing I had to treasure was poetry and the knowledge that I was going to be a poet.
I started writing poems to feel like I belonged.
Poetry needs a background in which emotional, as well as material values are given their due weight.
Let us not forget that going right back in our evolutionary DNA, poetry was the medium of utterance, ecstasy, a lullaby, an incantation, so before you had things written down, there was poetry. But somewhere along the line, particularly in the western tradition, the oral was cut off from the written, and then poetry began to be perceived as something abstract and airy fairy and not about the concrete fact. But let us face it: do we want to dwell in a world of concrete facts?
Appreciation of poetry, one out of 10 or whatever it might be, is quite alien to what a poet feels about poetry.