There are several challenges you should expect with reading poetry:

• Tone is tough to get at times.
• Line breaks draw our attention.  We might get mesmerized by them, forgetting the content.
• The subject matter and setting may be elusive, leading us to (mistakenly) believe we’re reading riddles.
• Free verse may see like broken up, fragmented prose instead of poetry.  We arrive with preconceptions.
• Repeated images might make us complacent, so that we stop thinking/experiencing a given poem when a familiar horse or crow enters into it.  This can be a problem. . .
• We may not know what we like or notice, so marking up the book can be a difficulty.
• We read too fast, losing much of the poem’s cadences and meaning.
• Again, we read way too fast, trying to cover difficult material.
• We fail to heed the invitation the poems images offer, which is often personal.  That is, the meanings and connections you may see are not utterly your own, because the poet set them up for you, but at the same time they may be particular to you.  This can be a dilemma, since we don’t want to be too relativistic (my truth and that’s all) or too impersonal (the poem has the meaning and nothing I bring matters).  Think about it.  Do you know what I mean?
• We may dissect the poem’s elements or motifs and forget that it’s an organic, whole thing!
• We may forget to scan the poem thoroughly for its parts, neglecting to analyze the whole.

I could go on ad nauseum.

Anyway, I hope you find at least a few things you can do better in this list.

I’m probably putting each error in because I have committed it!