I want to help you

[busker]

But if AI is just feeding us back to ourselves...doesn’t it still need us more than we need it? If the poems are only as good as the data we feed it, then we still need a human to feed it good data?

Only during the learning phase. Like in chess, the best poetry will be machine written some day. 
Actually, it would be interesting to explore this path. I might get stuck into it.