Li-Young Lee came to my university yesterday to give a craft talk/reading. He is one of my personal favorite poets. His talk went all over, and the way he approaches poetry is very different from most contemporary writers.
One of the things I had the opportunity to discuss with Lee was poetry as a whole and its relationship with words, as both a limiting and yet effective device. A point Lee made that made me look at a poem differently is that a poem is in fact a word. Words are merely labels we apply to identify something. To Lee, a poem is a identifier for something which has nothing else to identify it. It is made up of words but is itself a single solitary word identifying something in our lives that individual words cannot describe. Its like the word "killswitch," which combines two individual elements to create a new word which identifies something.
Lee also discussed the concept of poetry being a musical score for our dying breath. Nearly all human communication is done on exhalation. Biologically, he explained, when we breathe in, our bodies "fill up" and "come alive" as our blood fills with oxygen. Our muscles bulge, our skin stretches, our bones become more dense. When we exhale, the body "sinks in," our skin sagging, our muscles relaxing. Essentially, breathing in increases our vitality while breathing out decreases it. Therefore, you can extend this to say that inhaling is filling your body with life while exhaling is leaving it with death, hence "the dying breath." Poetry is thus meant to convey the most information, physical, spiritual, emotional, sexual, musical, etc., in the least amount of breath, therefore preserving the most vitality. The longer-winded you are, you convey more meaning but lose more vitality. Applicable? Not so much, but a very interesting thought and perspective.
Here is a poem by Li-Young Lee I find incredible...

Dwelling

As though touching her
might make him known to himself,

as though his hand moving
over her body might find who
he is, as though he lay inside her, a country

his hand's traveling uncovered,
as though such a country arose
continually up out of her
to meet his hand's setting forth and setting forth.

And the places on her body have no names.
And she is what's immense about the night.
And their clothes on the floor are arranged
for forgetfulness.