thinking like a poet

I am trying to get my head back into poetry, since I have been thinking solidly of Saracen Women for about six months. It is harder than I expected. After weeks of allowing my thought to relax and unfurl and unravel gently and build slowly into whatever I wanted, I now have to try something more lateral and spiky, more concentrated and allusive.
I'm reading Tom Paulin's The Secret Life of Poems, but I haven't yet got past thinking how hard I got smacked for writing about poetry like that when I was at university. Fashions change in criticism, as in so much else