The first step is to pick up a poem. We shouldn't worry about why we pick it up. Perhaps it's our curiosity about the famous person who wrote it. Perhaps the subject is what draws us to it. Oddly enough, it seems fame is often a better guide to the poetry that hits us hard, than subject matter is.
Fame is an acid test.
If you want to read a poem, the important thing is to have one in your hands. It helps to begin on the left end of the first line and continue across, eyeballing the words all the way to the right hand end of the line. We've probably already read the title, which drew us into the reading like a cover on a well-designed book. If the poem we are reading is in English or any other language we understand, each word our eyes encounter as we pass across the page registers some meaning and some sensation to the brain. This is called reading.