I've always shied away from poetry; it can be intimidating to try and extract meaning from a poem, especially when it doesn't fit a form that I can easily recognize. Fatimah Asghar's "From", as an example, is dense with meaning that feels inaccessible to me - It's almost like I can see the silhouette of meaning, but my own personal cultural context doesn't provide the light needed to make out fine details; I see fear and oppression, but there's something more behind it that I can't quite place. The poem asks things such as “How did you forget?” and “How will you remember?” which seem to be speaking of erasure; I assume the relationships between the languages presented by the poem make a conclusion like that easier to arrive at. "Kal", from the same author, presents less difficulty - I can recognize the pain and sorrow of mourning, and I can feel the loss; I empathize with it.
While I shy away from poetry, I still recognize it as a powerful tool for conveying cultural experience; especially in the context of oral traditions, poetry helps us to share everything from history to philosophy to warnings and advice. I want to make room for poetry within the context of a novel, as a tool for worldbuilding, exposition, and tension. I'm envisioning a character that recalls a poem describing a calamity, whose warnings mirror current events. Producing unique, interesting, and effective poetry for such a task requires a great deal of thought and planning, but I think it enriches the reading experience in a way that's hard to achieve otherwise.
I need to practice reading and writing poetry in general in order to achieve my goal of using it metatextually. Exploring different avenues of inspiration for poetry has been helpful; it is especially important in the context of diegetic writing, where I'm trying to embody an author that is not going to have my interests, predilections, and ideas. Exposure to a diverse set of perspectives will also help to make such writing more varied, interesting, and believable.