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This, exactly.
I can knock off doggerel and nonsense verse in minutes. But that, to me, is not poetry. Something I would call a poem can take anywhere from an evening to a couple of weeks to write. I often mull over a single line for days, only to have it jump out at me while brushing my teeth one morning.
Neither exercise is a warm-up for writing prose. But I do think writing poetry has made me more attuned to language and better at paring it down to essentials. (Writing doggerel, on the other hand is useful only for entertaining my little nieces and nephews.)
I'm so glad you said this. I was thinking something was wrong with me when it comes to how long it takes to write a poem. It seems like it should be much easier and I should be banging out cleaner drafts or maybe not even need to do anymore drafts. But poetry requires a lot of thought and a good ear and needs time to develop. And writing formal poetry means planning or at least thinking ahead a little as you're writing.
I am a pretty fast writer when I comes to prose, but that skill is not really transferring over. I know I'm still very new at poetry and probably not even supposed to be good yet. But after a few months of poetry, my fiction is on fire. I just wrote my best story ever. I kept catching myself paying attention so sound and rhythm. My new story sounds like someone else, a better writer, wrote this one. I am in love with my story and that hasn't happened in a long time.
So, if It takes me a dozen hours + to write one bad poem, but I'm able to write a more remarkable story than I could before, the whole thing is worth it. I think I might stick with this poetry thing for awhile.