It's often not a matter of choice.
In many instances you can't stop yourself.
It's an urge - visited upon you - to render communicable a feeling that is difficult to express, but that just wont go away - an urge for knowledge, peace, cathartic purging.
It's a desire to capture pain or pleasure in a way that helps you better understand, escape or keep it.
A motivation to communicate troubling or thrilling experience.
To try to tell others your truth.
To express in language what is bigger than language...
that which has moved you extraordinarily, caused anguish or ecstacy...
so you can know yourself better, diminish the pain or prolong the pleasure...
but equally so you can share your wonder or awe or sadness or anger or joy with another human being...
to prove to yourself that you are not alone, that you are not nothing, that you being on earth makes a difference, that you are contributing something, somehow.
Poetry is an effort to connect with others, with yourself and with the world and universe at large...
to comprehend the incomprehensible...
to add to an existing pool of knowledge or beauty.
It's also about (yup, here we go again, and here, and here) getting laid.
Men are often motivated to impress women with words in hopes of convincing them of their worth, of conquering them...
of being loved and cared for by them, of being noticed, acknowledged, recognized, revered and worshipped.
Poetry is born out of need.
Paul Muldoon once told methat if a poem accomplishes what its author wants it to then it's a success.
I suppose if enough others feel, or are moved or benefit in similar ways, then it assumes a status as good or great, which in turn exposes it to new ears and eyes.