Allowing Poetry to Speak to You

When I saw this quote, it touched a nerve within me that rang all sorts of bells and whistles...

"A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice." -Anthony Hecht

This takes me to the core belief that I have about the issue of accessibility in poetry and why I believe we should not have to defend poetry that is outside that nice clean little cozy realm of accessibility.

In fact, I hunger for poetry that is more then a read it through once and be able to say, "that's nice." I much prefer to allow the poem to speak to me than for me to read it as though it were a Dick and Jane reader and presto it is all perfectly clear at that period at the end of the last sentence.