One question I unfortunately don’t ask myself often enough, and I know it is my choice of diction. Some of my poems are less kid-friendly than they should be because I always say I write for an audience of one, namely myself, and I say if it pleases me then maybe somebody else will get some enjoyment out of it, but that isn’t always true for a third grader because many of the words are beyond the ken of children.
That’s why I have to spend an awful lot of time simply thinking about word choice. Of course I’m also thinking about the verse form, whether it should be a haiku or a limerick, or a villanelle or a sonnet or whatever, or free verse, but mostly it’s just about word choice for me.