"It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry."
When I was a teenager I was waiting in the kitchen for my mom to do something. I was in a bad mood and frustrated at having to wait, and and I resigned myself to staring at a bit of artwork my mother had recently put up - one of Andy Warhol's soup cans, and I determined that I would stare at nothing but this stupid picture until I found something interesting about it. After a moment or two I thought that it was interesting how tragic it was that in our society a master artist spent his time illustrating... soup cans.
Even as I was completing the thought, it struck me, like a truck, that this may have been exactly the intended message. That some graphic designer, who might have the soul of an artist, would have to earn a living doing the iconography on a soup can - for no higher purpose than crass commercialism, and even that wouldn't be original, but mass produced by machines and assembly lines - that in our society art itself was subsumed by capitalism.
That was the first moment that I realized art might be more than pretty pictures. In my own home office I have that same picture now. It reminds me of a lot of thoughts - the memory of that realization, striving against creativity enslaved by capitalism, and my own mother.
I bring this up because I think there is some sense in which "poetry" can separate writing from meaning, but there is another way in which poetry, or abstract expression like art, can encode meaning that simple and direct communication cannot hope to.
In college I heard a poem that went "The apparition of these faces in a crowd; petals on a wet, black, bough". I still don't know exactly what that feeling is, but I feel that way from time to time and recite that poem to myself when I do.
Poetry, or art, is inexact, but I think it is a lot closer to the pure idea form of communication. At least when it works.