No, poetry is an art form. Like all art, poetry is (properly) ordered to truth-telling. Of course the truth-telling of art is different from what we expect of a newspaper or physics text, but it lies at the core of what it means to be human, to ponder great questions and to propose answers. There are those who’re utterly bored by this, but those poor souls are less than fully human.
It’s a common misunderstanding among the semi-educated, that the purpose of college is to get a highly-paying job. In reality, the purpose of college is to get an education. Sometimes education makes one highly employable; other times it simply makes one deeply wise. I understand that these days no one assigns value to wisdom. That’s a shame, because the destiny of those who scorn wisdom is slavery. The preventative to that used to be what we call a “liberal” education — the education suited to a free man, as opposed to servile education, which is the sort of training you give a clever slave. While I’m not surprised at the folly of those who scorn wisdom, it still shocks me when those who aspire to nothing higher than comfortable slavery actually boast of it. Some people are just natural slaves, I guess.
To posit that wisdom is only acquired by sitting in a college classroom discounts the wisdom of most people in history. One wonders how wise King Solomon could have become if only he had taken a modern free-form art, a Chicano culture studies or a slam poetry class at Evergreen College. Just think of the great works Mozart might have produced had his parents the forethought to enroll him in a watercolor painting class at the local community college. And then there are the millions of wise people through the thousands of years who never attended college and whose names will never be known.
While poetry may be an art form, it's practice is largely a hobby, just as one would expect to be the outcome of the other curiccula mentioned above. Your assertion about the relationship between art and truth is an unfounded opinion. A certain amount of navel-gazing is understandable, but one has to eat.