I'm sure this isn't an original thought but I believe that poetry is the use of words in a way most compatible with zen because the best of poetry goes beyond discursive thinking to evoke feelings/experience: the best poetry evokes a non-discursive experience by means of language.

Poetry is like music this way.

Somewhere maybe in the book about Zen's Chinese Heritage there is story about an ancestor who comes upon a group of monks arguing with each other about what a sutra means and the master gets angry and tells them to stop reading the sutras and spend more time on the cushion, he then turns to a second smaller group of monks who have been observing the argument and says to them something like "and writing poetry is almost as bad as reading sutras." My question is, why only almost as bad?