Or is poetry awkward? Free verse comes off as pretentious to me, and while the rule of thumb is that anything can look good so long as executed properly, I just find something so inherently crippled about poetry.
Maybe it's something about meaning being too obscured, or maybe that modern poetry is frequently garbage. I'm not meaning to insult anyone either, because Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath and many other writers are worth admiring.
But something about most modern poetry just feels airy and trite to me.