Which is more important?

[Truerenigma]

I think in our (collective) endeavours to make the poem the best it can be, we sometimes loose that moment of sharp focus that True spoke of

That's all well and good, but may not necessarily be true; the edit, fuzzy or not, may be the truer account of the authors experience (for all we know). As for me, I would most likely do better to write a poem /in/ these moments than /about/ them.

or the idea that resonated with me from Todd:- I'm into capturing true observations and conveying some level of emotional experience.

That's all fine and good too, but it's hardly a requirement, or even a common element of all "good" poetry.

If I only wanted to do is accurately record a factual event, and convey, or /express/, my feelings about it, I think prose would be the simpler, and more effective way of doing so. Poetry's mnemonics (rhyme, meter, refrain, line breaks) are no longer needed for processing and holding on to knowledge. Little hard drives, texting devices, and video cameras are available everywhere. Poetry may be an /aesthetics of omission/. Among other things, poetry is a tampering with truths which the world of prose (and its naturalistic approach to mimesis) takes for granted. Poetry creates its own /truth/, it may be the same truth as the world's, and it may not. Whichever the case may be, its mimesis is always a rearrangement, at a molecular level, of that axis between the "seen" and the "felt" /that axis which connects the childish eye to the Socratic heart/, which, were it not for poetry, with its misguided Method of elenchus, would remain obscured. But I don't I think the poem necessarily needs to be /clever/ either—sometimes the simpler approach is the correct one, and the genius may lie in the reading.

In a workshop, we can only critique the words and their arrangement, tone, sound, form, voice, etc. We are in no position to critique the experience of the author, or their /feelings/, perspectives, points of view, etc...we have no idea where they are coming from.

I don't think that it is necessary to write from an actual experience, or event, or series of events; or that an author's poems need to say anything about the author, aside, perhaps, about his or her level of skill, and dedication to their craft. Just as how someone who is studying a painting may think they are looking into the dark recesses in the corners of the artist's mind—the artist may have just been admiring the Fibonacci sequence in a sea shell, and it may have impacted them profoundly, or maybe they just thought that they could apply its /form/ to a painting of a cityscape, in a way that would be appealing to the eye.

You see, it's when having an intrinsic understanding of some particular thing helps reveal unto the poet /how/ it may lend itself to poetic form—thereien lies the /true/ value of experience.