Poetry is ...

Poetry is a foretaste of truth. It is the vestibule of faith. It is contemporary poets who have turned it into smoke and mirrors.

- Anna Kamienska, Polish Poet

I have to say, I mostly agree (though that's a rather exalted notion of poetry). If a poem is completely indecipherable, that is not necessarily the readers fault. Poetry might take effort to understand, but there ought to be a reward when you do. They talk about "burying meaning" in poetry, but there ought to be a meaning to uncover, that is uncoverable. I do find that a lot of modern poets seem aiming at obscurantism, and what, pray tell, is then the purpose? Worse still, I've sat in workshops where the poet has been asked what is the "it" in their poem and has been unable to give an answer (so they weren't obscuring anything, because there was nothing there to obscure), so heaven knows what they thought a reader would glean from it. It's little wonder that many people out there consider poetry to be completely irrelevant to their life. 

One thing I greatly appreciated about doing a poetry workshop with Judith Beveridge is that she told us a poem should be specific, concrete and particular. I cheered on the inside. And then the way into poetry is that one day you find the poem, and it articulates something in a way that rings deep with you, because you've lived that experience, or it teaches you something by showing you something new or something in a new way. But it has to be about that something, and eventually let you know it's about that something.