What makes good poetry?

Feel free to discuss or post poems or quotes my other poets...

I think a poem is powerful when it transcends the words it uses and it identifies a common human experience. A poem can, becuse they tend to be vague, allow people to interpet their own subjective meaning onto it so anyone can like it, but I think the most powerful poems, despite people using different words to describe how they experience it, touch on a universal truth... hm....

I have a hard time bringing across what I am trying to say in poems and I think it's because I intellectualize it. I start with a couplet that really sounds good in my head, it just comes out, and from there I'm start trying to concot a rhyme scheme or to prove a point and either it becomes less powerful or the rhythm falls apart. What about you guys??

I strive for imagery in my poems, or I will try to anyway if I write more poems, 'cause the only poems I've written are the three that are currently on the poetry forum. So I've basically just started writing poems.

Oh wait...I think I've written a couple of poems in high school (it was required), but I lost them.

Also, I think good poems can make you feel an emotion. They don't have to make you feel an emotion, but a lot of them do. When I first read Maya Angelou's I Rise, I just wanted to keep reading it over and over. It's got that sassy toen like you're telling someone off.

lol that's funny I was actually thinking of maya angelou when I started this thread... cause I was like reading her poems... reading mine... reading her poems... reading mine... no hope for me.... haha. she just has rhythm and energy! WHERE DOES IT COME FROM