Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible
This is going to sound nuts but it took me forever to figure out why I'd stopped writing poetry - I mean, I went about a decade where I wrote very little poetry and I thought it was because I was doing a weekly blog. And then when we moved, I reconfigured my writing desk. The previous one had had very little space to write by hand. And suddenly, the poetry was gushing!
No one can learn to love by following a manual, and no one can learn to write by following a course. I'm not telling you to seek out other writers but to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm.
I tend to write songs fast, so the process usually only lasts around 30 minutes. In the studio is where I really can artistically breathe, and let my ideas flow.
For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.
When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.
Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.
Writing lyrics with your wife does lead to talking about yourselves a lot. But this is not an autobiographical account of my personal marriage. It's almost about the marriage of the band.