I don't need a shrink, I need poems

I recently entered a poetry competition - don't get excited, it would be a miracle if I won! - and a couple of days later came across a blog in the New York Times entitled Does Poetry Matter?. It's an interesting question. I'm no poet, I'm a writer who happened to have a few poems in the locker from when I did my masters. Most of them were awful but a few were quite good so I thought I'd give this competition a shot, you never know what'll happen. Now I'm not doing to debate Gregory Cowles excellent blog, but I will reference one of the replies it received. EKSwitaj of Belfast said: "Who cares if poetry matters? Poetry is." Well said. I don't have fond memories of studying poetry in high school and until I did my writing masters a few years ago had no real interest in poetry. But reading back through some of the poems I wrote at that time I could feel the energy I was trying to create and wished I could get some of that raw freshness into my fiction. One of these days I'll go back and write some new poems and see what happens. I certainly think writing poetry helped unlock some creative juices at a time when the mind was struggling to create large pieces of fiction. So there you have it. I won't be forking out $100 (or whatever the going rate is) for therapy when all I need is a pen and paper to write a poem.