Do you prefer writing poetry?

[NoahRyan]

I'm good at writing it and I enjoy it, but the only poetry I've ever liked that's not my own, is from modern songs, like White Rabbit, Purple Haze, Time, No Quarter, or some of the lyrics Jim Steinman writes. Anything else, I can often see that it's good, and that the poet probably found the perfect word for what they were trying to say, but to me it doesn't seem very nice at all. Whereas with my own, I can find the perfect words for what I'm trying to say, and arrange them all to suit the visualisation in my mind, but I can't see how anyone else would be able to read that and enjoy it, because whilst the words are great (for me), they're not precise. So the reader probably wouldn't get the quality of image that I get, right? But then, a few people at school read a short story I wrote for an assignment, which was more just a poem without verses and stanzas, and they liked it heaps. I myself can't even enjoy it as much now when I read it again.
So how do people enjoy poetry so much? Do I just need to keep looking to find something that'll assume a colourful little spot in my memory? That's sort of how I think of all the poems, books, songs etc that I really like, and so far there's only three written poems that come near to that; London 1802 by Wordsworth, the 7th stanza of The Soul's Traveling by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and perhaps Bright Star by John Keats. But even these, I only really like because I'm desperate to find some poetry that I enjoy reading. There's some authors who I like for their tone and language, which is what makes poetry good (C.S. Lewis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge), except neither of them when they write poems, keep this tone; it's only used for prose.

[Lightning Rod]

interesting observations
the problem with words meaning different things to different readers is something every writer must resolve in his own way. It's a fact of life, though. You can't be sure that whatever tone and inflection that you hear when you see a group of words is going to be even vaguely similar to what someone else hears. Even if you hear the words spoken into the air, you don't know what effects they will have on various ears. Hopefully, the better writers we become, the match between what we intend to say and what our audience hears and takes from it will get closer and closer.

I have been attempting for some years to devise a style of poetic prose which is conversational and uses poetic and rhetorical devices. I'm still amazed when I discover what some readers take away from reading my work. You can know what you mean to say but you can't know what baggage your reader is bringing with him. My policy is to write so that I can understand it when I read it the next morning....haha.