I Wonder About Poetry

In the past six months or so, I have been participating in a poetry workshop led by Jennie Feldman, a British poet who lives in Israel. She is a fine teacher, creating a supportive atmosphere in the group, heightening out appreciation of our own poems and those she brings in by recognized poets (she calls them published poems).
It's been valuable for me. Because of the group, I have written a bunch of poems, and because of the critiques and responses both to my poems and to the others, I've become a better reader of poetry.
However, in fact, I am not a reader of poetry. Occasionally I'll buy a book of poems, occasionally I'll skim through it and read something. But I would say that poetry accounts for maybe 2% of my total reading.
So why should I write the kind of thing that I'm not interested in reading?
One reason I don't read much poetry is that so much of what pretends to be poetry is simply dreadful. You have to wade through a long, long low tide before you get to the deep water. To illustrate:
Recently I was asked to be a judge in a poetry contest. There have been about forty entries so far, of which thirty could be dismissed immediately as (a) not poetry, (b) not written in literate English, and (c) not on the topic of the contest. I had a similar experience as the editor of a volume of a literary journal.
On the other hand, I do read the poems that appear in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, to which we subscribe. But some of them don't speak to me at all. I can see in some objective way that they are well wrought poems, but they aren't about things that interest me. I'm particularly suspicious of nature poems. I have picked a lot of figs this month, and I thought that someone else might write a poem about that. But harnessing nature to your poetry is cheating, in a way. It's like sprinting on one of those conveyor belts they have in airports.