Maaan, I don't know what poems are for. To me, they were a thing I played with a lot as a kid, they taught me the rudiments of writing, the good(ish- if I'm honest, almost, nearly good) way to put words to use. But I never did get anywhere with it, and it always seemed, in the end like one of those big skills, the grand abilities like Rocketry and Fortran - something that the devoted expert could really use to fashion something remarkable - Homeric - for example - but which for most, is a simple kind of pastime for filling idle hours.
For me, it's pretty hard to separate "writing" from "writing poetry"...they are both essential to how I process the world, but poetry tends to atrophy if I don't practice it much, hence this project. If I let it fall by the wayside then I tend to only pick it up in times of great stress or emotional shock, because those states tend to make me look differently at what's happening, things kind of slow down and I want to dive in with a poem to make sense of it. But with practice, I can dive in even without sadness or whatever. That's the craft part of it for me. And partly it's also about being in dialogue with other writers -- responding to their poems or forms or whatnot. That's not something I can do without poetry. An essay about a poem vs a poem about a poem. Maybe that's obtuse but it's how my brain works, when I cultivate it. But it is, as you say, also simply a deeply pleasurable hobby, if a hobby is understood to be the kind of thing you can't live without.
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