How to read a poem

It would be hard to call the following a poem:

I tell my students that a poem should stimulate the imagination not the intellect.

Can reformatting it make it a poem?

I tell my students

  A poem should

  stimulate

          the imagination

  not

           the intellect

Or is a generous application of metaphors required? (with thanks to Billy Collins)

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

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