I think Pinsky was trying to be funny. People who already knew the answers to the questions might have appreciated the humor, but I can understand how his flippancy might have annoyed others. A person who is unused to reading poetry would not find simply reading those poems helpful at all. I think sme sort of analysis was deifnitely in order, but of course Pinsky couldn't indulge in that because
(1) he wouldn't have been to achieve that degree of careful, condescending insouciance
(2) he himself is a poet. Although I am going out on a limb here, if I were a poet, I wouldn't want to analyze poems too meticulously and technically for others--I'd want to maintain a certain level of "mysteriousness"

All that having been said, I offer my humble answer to one or some of the questions. One of the most attractive things to me about poetry is the unity of form and meaning. In prose, generally the words convey meaning through their meanings, and nothing more. In poetry, the words can also express meaning through the way they look. This is why line breaks are so important in poetry, and why a poem wouldn't be the same without them.

To use an example from "You Said You Would Write," a poem by Billy Collins.

Two strong coffees
And an hour of unfocused staring,

and now the hour rolls around
to put on some clothes

and then to take them off again
and return to bed.

You can look up the entire poem online, but I think there's a melancholy about the poem, a tone that's achieved through the well-placed line breaks. If read without regard to the line breaks, the entire poem would only be composed of two to three sentences (this section being one sentence). But the line breaks are vital to this poem. The pauses they add are reminiscent of a sad, hurt person recalling a painful memory. Such a person would not talk nonstop, but rather slowly and ponderously, allowing gaps of silence. I think the difference can be seen by reading this istanza out loud, with and without the lin breaks. "Two strong coffees and an hour of unfocused staring" is brisk, but a meaningless string of two activities: drinking coffee and staring. The line contains no emotion, just the bare facts. However, in the original lines, "Two strong cofees/ and an hour of unfocused staring" the vague depression that the speaker might be feeling can be more tangibly felt through the formatting of the lines, in the unnatural pause between the coffee drinking and the hour of unfocused staring. Of course, in prose, you would convey the mood in a different way--but poetry, I think, is unique in that it can use so few words, and put them together in such a way, to make the reader feel a specific way.