Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed
Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.
My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.
Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.
poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.
Your poems will happen when no one is there.