In school, we get hammered with poetry in North America. We spend an unwholesome amount of time pouring over the work of classic poets of the English language. I found it all a bore until I came across Edgar Allen Poe's the Raven. That spoke more to my boyish sensibilities. The opening of this poem is very famous and I even have it memorized:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”

The poem is epic, it didn't really click in until I heard it spoken on a Simpsons Halloween episode.

The show took creative liberties with the poem, so it's better to read the original, but the point is that if you can "hear" not just read the poem, then this immensely helps one to enjoy it.

I was influence greatly by the work of the Beats because they moved away from writing traditional poems about love and little pretty birds, but instead wrote poems about their adventures and misadventures in the city. Social issues, sexuality, drug use, etc. Usually, their poems did not rhyme, but instead used a free-flow stream of consciousness style that allowed them to break the linearity of conventional thinking. I come from this school of thought, preferring to write about esoteric matters, though I also sprinkle a bit of love and pretty birds now and then.

Of course, you need to take into account the differences in our cultures and gender. There have been many female poets in western cultures, but for the most part it has been a male dominated sphere of art. So a lot of the poetry may be gender and culture specific.

At Tower Peak by Gary Snyder

Every tan rolling meadow will turn into housing
Freeways are clogged all day
Academies packed with scholars writing papers
City people lean and dark
This land most real
As its western-tending golden slopes
And bird-entangled central valley swamps
Sea-lion, urchin coasts
Southerly salmon-probes
Into the aromatic almost-Mexican hills
Along a range of granite peaks
The names forgotten,
An eastward running river that ends out in desert
The chipping ground-squirrels in the tumbled blocks
The gloss of glacier ghost on slab
Where we wake refreshed from ten hours sleep
After a long day's walking
Packing burdens to the snow
Wake to the same old world of no names,
No things, new as ever, rock and water,
Cool dawn birdcalls, high jet contrails.
A day or two or million, breathing
A few steps back from what goes down
In the current realm.
A kind of ice age, spreading, filling valleys
Shaving soils, paving fields, you can walk in it
Live in it, drive through it then
It melts away
For whatever sprouts
After the age of
Frozen hearts. Flesh-carved rock
And gusts on the summit,
Smoke from forest fires is white,
The haze above the distant valley like a dusk.
It's just one world, this spine of rock and streams
And snow, and the wash of gravels, silts
Sands, bunchgrasses, saltbrush, bee-fields,
Twenty million human people, downstream, here below.