Poetry is anything that somebody says it is. It is often thought to have rythm and high-reaching aims, but really anything can be poetry. Bombs falling above your head can be an awful poetry. Structures are said to have a poetry to them. Raindrops falling can be poetic to some. Ballet dancers are said to move like poetry in motion. Now we can animate words and letters to the point that they become symbols whose shapes are manipulated to achieve a stylistic goal. If somebody says it is poetry, fine, cool. I think that the word is too broad to have any useful meaning, unless you specify a type or style or poet. To me, the word "poetry" has as much concrete, desciptive value as the words "big", "bad", and "blue". Without specific context and many more qualifiers, it is too subjective a term to really accomplish much.
But it still conjures a specific sensation/idea in my head. Go figure.
Why do people make poetry? Out of words? Out of dancing? Stone? Nature? Nothing? The word poetry is just a name we have given to an incredibly broad set of individual qualifiers. We create a poetry out of Nature's raindrops ourselves, and the melodic verse you hear while they fall may just be pissing on my parade.