how to observe like a poet pt. 1: depedestalizing profundity/"intensity"

The first step to learning how to observe like a poet is to like go of the idea that you have to say something big, like go of the idea that you have to betray whatever events you're writing about and not emphasize their supposed profundity. Often when you ask the question of how to observe like a poet, you're met with advice like, "live more intentionally," "take it slower," "don't be in such a rush to get to your destination." Just do a quick scanning of your surroundings, which is all great advice, but I'd wager that most people's problem isn't necessarily the kind of blindness that would lead the identifying of physical associations between two or numerous objects for the sake of a metaphor impossible. It's moving from the accumulation of these associations and life experience parsed towards lines that communicate what you actually make of them. When approaching poetry as a beginner, you often lead with the goal of trying to write something that perfectly captures the enormity of your feeling and rather than treating this as the inevitable byproduct of having written towards truth, this downstream effect that naturally emerges from the precision this requires, it's instead treated as the place from which you're meant to start. This is troublesome for about the same reason as trying to tyrannically govern the progression of a platonic relationship towards intimacy after having just met them and then measuring the long-term viability of that relationship according to how receptive they are of attempts they may not even know were being made, rather than being willing to believe that, with the right person, the organic building of a rapport will naturally lead to that anyway. Every line written is measured almost exclusively against this question whether or not it communicates a kind of intensity that ironically becomes more amorphous and impersonal, the more aggressively this approach is insisted upon. I mean, think about the most nauseatingly precious line you've ever read in your entire life. Did it make you feel more invested in whatever stakes produced it? Did it make you feel more psychologically attuned to the speaker or protagonist? Did it, regardless of the genre, manage to still keep you in the narrative or were you suddenly ejected from it due to reaction you might have had? A few of these lines sprinkled across a poetry collection or across several chapters of a book might not prove irredeemably disruptive, but when you can tell it's a pillar, when you can tell that it's the product of a deeply ingrained attitude or notion about the act of translating feeling rather than some lack of an additional editorial sweep or it toying the line between profound and mastery in a way that's heavily dependent upon how justifiable it is according to the surrounding context of the narrative, then it becomes obtrusive. I think we tend to overestimate the reliability of intensity alone as a signifier for coherent identity within a work, simply because it's raw and unfiltered, in that same way that inspires us to conflate impulsivity with honesty. And because it aligns seamlessly with this culturally cemented idea of how you're supposed to interact with yourself when writing poetry: mining yourself for the "worthy" highs and lows, and then being assumed to intuitively know how to work backwards from them towards an actual point. Once you deprioritize that as the only worthy conclusion, I think then you'll find your path towards what you really mean to say, less obstructed. Anyway, as always let me know what you think, let me know if you've ever had trouble with that kind of pedestalizing, and as always remember this: we're here to learn and grow together.