The Bronx Masquerades Again

I have spent a good chunk of the last week pondering the book Bronx Masquerade and our class discussion of the format. One question that I have been wrestling with the most is why this book was able to make me enjoy the poetry when that is an aspect of Language Arts that I have truly disliked for most of my school career. The last time that I can remember even quasi liking poetry is when my high school freshman English class read Romeo and Juliet. In that case I loved the story and I was familiar enough with it that the poetry format of the writing was secondary to the romance. However, with the Bronx Masquerade the story is in a very different format and the poems were more traditional in style, but I looked forward to reading the poems. This did not change the fact that I still hate William Carlos William's Red Wheelbarrow poem with a passion, but I really enjoyed this set of work.
At first I thought it might be because I was able to connect with the characters when they gave their synopses about the thought processes and events leading up to the creation of the poem, but then I wondered how I was able to connect so strongly in just two to three pages of text. It seems like a contradiction that both of these were able to happen at the same time.
I want to figure out some answer to this question because I want to be able to help my future students to enjoy poetry in a way that I have rarely had the opportunity to. My teacher's taught me to hate poetry by forcing me to analyze it for every poetry unit I can remember. Maybe it's because I did not have the chance to make a connection with the author the way this book gave me a chance to (in the sense that the author of the book creates the authors of the individual poems that I so enjoyed). I want to give my future students the chance to love this form of literature, and to do this most effectively I think it would help to know how this book helped me to like it after so many years of dislike.