Writing poetry

I'd love to be a famous poet someday, or at least to write one or two decent poems - that would do. This has been on my mind for years. Trouble is, I've hardly written a poem for a long, long time. But I've been working up to it in all sorts of ways. I'd tell you about it but you might laugh. Anyway in the last week I've written a few of the suckers and I think I might finally be able to start chugging away. Here is what I think the tricks might be, at least for me:

1. Learn to write truely about things. Not all the time, but at least on occasions. You must (I think) have the capacity to do this, or there is no point proceeding. You have to be able to write about something, read it back and realise that you conveyed that thing just as it is (not in its entirety, but in its essence or in the detail you were concentrating on), and that no word is either lacking or superfluous.
2. One of the things I've done is to look at the content of poems written by poets I respect. In the lyric poetry that is apparently in vogue at the moment1 the poets seem to focus on one event or scene. They describe it in some detail and draw out associations, which they may also go into in detail. So you have to milk one thing for all it's worth. The trouble with my old poems is that I took the one thing and wrote about it briefly - which was nice and all but unsatisfying to read. You need something that you can get your teeth into, but that is different from a novel's narrative. I think that reading a poem should be an exercise in looking at the world carefully and pausing awhile on one thing.
3. If you're having trouble getting started, start by talking about one true thing.2 It can be something very small and humble. But make sure it is leading towards your main subject, otherwise you will have an o'er pithy poem.
4. While I do want to examine my subject in some detail, I also need to know when to stop. In the past I've started writing with a vision of what I want to get across, the feeling I want people to leave with. I think a better approach is to have an idea of the sort of direction you want to go in, but have no particular expectations of what you will say. Then you can just go with what is working and stop when you have said enough. If this means you neglected to mention an important part of the experience, then so be it. Better to say some things truely and consideredly than to include everything and say it badly.
5. Because I approach the world with an analytic, overviewy, self-aware sort of style, my natural inclination is to write in horrendous abstracted, psychological language - telling rather than showing.3 I suspect that for me, the way out of this is not to try and ape an orthodox method, but rather to focus on the outcome. I need to make sure that I include sensory description. I don't really care how I do this, just that it is there (and is true).

Best wishes for any fellow wannabe writers out there. May you also write one or two decent pieces before you die.

1 B Emery, "Fiction and Prose: Thin Partitions do their Bounds Divide," in JS Batts, M Bradstock, JL Sheppard, T Thorpe, L Vellins (eds), Five Bells: Australian Poetry (Vol 16 No 4 2009), 38.

2 Paul Simon, in an interview I once heard.

3 Thanks to Mikey for helping me see this.