Why write a poem? This is an interesting question. 

Are you a poet? oh, yes, I am! Then what make you become a poet? When and why do you become a poet? How do you feel when you write a poem? What is the difference between you and those "non-poet"? It is obvious that you are not born to be a poet. When you grew up, you find special beauty and meaning in your life. You feel happy and want to express it in your own language. That's really a individual or personal feeling that you want to share with others eagerly. Then you write down some sentences with soft feeling and beautiful vocabularys. They bring you more happiness when you read them. You are satisfactied and can't help writting another because you have been excited for a whole day. Perhaps you are in love, perhaps you are not. You are only touched by something you have never expected. That is beauty. So that is the difference between you and those people who never dreamed of writing a poem. You are more senstive and more likely to be moved. It seems that you have some special mechanism in your body or heart to receive those magical information from the nature. Nevertheless, that is not determined by you. You are born to be senstive because you have a different gene in your body. So I don't because a poet can be teached and excised. He becomes a poet because he is in nature. Certainly he can study some express skills or techniques, but he can't study those poetic emotions which he didn't poessess at all.  

A poem's coming is an undenied thing. It emerges in your heart and torments you untill you write it down. Those poems that are produced are not really poems because they have no real feelings to move readers, even the writer. Perhaps they are commercial process or results. Real poems are from your soul. They are neither instruments to help you to kill time, nor the homeworks that arranged by others. They are children of your own crying for a birth. They are pearls that have grown up in your heart. I don't like those poems which are produced for tens or hundreds in one day. They look like toys from producing line with no personality. There are many poems are such types, they are written for some special purpose. I don't believe they can be handed down for a long time. 

Indeed, writting poems needs skills. You need to express yourself more successfully. You need to grasp some vocabularies, grammer, rhythm and esthetics knowledge. You should imagine the impact of a word on a reader when it is used with another. If you can't, you only need to understand yourself, that is enough. When a poem is written, it becomes an individual which will not be belonged to only you. It will finished its final esthetics value by the reader's understanding and psychological identification.  

Are you a poet when you write a poem or only when you write one hundred poems? I think poet is a professional address. Poet is not used to name a common one who writes a few poems occasionaly. A poet should be one whose life is contacted with writting poems tightly. He looks at the world in a different poetic vision and his main work is to write poems. The purpose of his writing is not only to please himself but also to please others. Some people even making living on poems. I guess poem is their meaning of life. 

I write a poem occassionally, but I don't think I am a poet because I can't treat writing in a serious or professional way. I like to read or write a poem just like to listen to a music. what I pursue is the appreciation of beauty instead of creation of beauty. My only purpose is to please myself when I write or read. If you get the same pleasure from them, that is only an natural thing. 

Writing a poem is a kind of life style. I like it only because I love life and beauty.