The great thing about poetry is how ubiquitous it is in our everyday lives, often without us even noticing. Usually it's thought of as an archaic and rigidly structured system of words/meanings, which you have to reread multiple times in order to truly appreciate. I've never liked this approach because it treats art as having only one single meaning, while treating the reader's own personal thoughts on the work as basically irrelevant if they don't conform to the accepted consensus. It seems like it would be more helpful if we stopped looking at poetry as something we should appreciate and more as something we should enjoy.
One of the major points of writing and reading poetry is to let the words blend with your own life experiences so you can have a meeting of the minds with a writer you admire. I have this totally unprovable theory that people naturally gravitate toward works of art they can relate to. Most of the time there is no conscious attempt to find a work of art for just the right time. It often just kind of happens, independent of our own human will.
Think of the time you watched a movie that seemed to sum up the way you were feeling when you walked into the theater. Or maybe there was a book you read once where the narrative seemed to echo your own internal ideas about life. I consider listening to Bob Dylan to be the first real time this happened to me and most recently it's been reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Engaging with art this way can be a remedy for loneliness because it shows us that everyone has the same feelings we do just as strongly as we do.
Great poetry, and by extension great writing in general, isn't something you can quantify and write down in an x,y,z/step by step process. It often isn't very logical. When it's working you'll feel it in your innermost being (basically your soul if you're inclined to religious terminology) and trying to explain why usually just deflates a part of the experience. Sure, you can note all of the techniques used (alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhyme) and talk about how they make you feel, but at the end of the day that's not going to explain why you get a sense of catharsis from reading something you connect with on a gut/spiritual level.
The point I'm going for here is you don't necessarily even need formal structure, rhyme or traditional meter to make something "poetic" out of your words and thoughts. Poetry is devoted to describing the things we have no other outlet for. Things like how much you love your parents or the unknowably complex thoughts you have when you look at the sky.
The language we speak is taught to us when we're not even old enough to remember learning it. It's the most potent instrument we have as a species to explain to other people what the world looks like through our eyes. Everyone has their own little quirks of speech and patterns of thinking. Poetry is simply writing down your individual experiences the way you remember them and letting readers see what it's like to be you for a couple pages.
So go do something meaningful and share it with a person you love!
