Some "totally obvious" reflections on poetics and other aesthetic matters:
Some people appreciate poetry and others don't.
If a poem doesn't capture the reader's attention in some way, he or she won't want to read it.
Things that capture some people's attention leave other people totally flat.
The reasons for liking or not liking something can be critical or non-critical or both.
People sometimes change their mind about what they like or don't like in poetry and the other arts.
Reasons for changing one's mind can be critical or non-critical or both.
Sometimes people read things even when they don't want to--like if they have to for a class, or if they just want to feel like they are "well-rounded."
Sometimes (usually?) it is harder to explain why we do like something than why we don't.
It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't like poetry why it might be worth their while to give it more of a chance.
You can't usually make much money writing poetry.
Poetry is cheaper to produce than visual art, because you don't have to buy as many materials.
More people listen to music on a regular basis than read poetry.
Music will usually liven up a party more effectively than poetry will.
"Pop critics" are different from plain old music (rock, jazz, hip hop, etc.) critics in that plain old music critics are mainly interested in the music itself and pop critics are also (perhaps sometimes chiefly) interested in its popularity.
Most ordinary people (non-critics) who like pop are more interested in it as music than in its popularity (except to the extent that they might be interested in being popular themselves, or being associated with popular and famous people).
To be interested in popularity is not necessarily the same thing as wanting to be popular.
Lots of people would like to be popular, however, who would never admit it.
Being popular is fun (except when it's stressful).
Most popular poets are not "popular" on the same level as popular musicians.
Popular musicians who also write poetry are often not taken very seriously by people who mainly write poetry.
If you're already popular for some other reason, that can help make it easier to get your poetry published.
It's hard to explain why Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge is "objectively" a better poet than Jimmy Carter (or vice versa) to someone who disagrees with you or who just doesn't care about poetry.
It's pretty hard to explain to anyone else, for that matter.
Many of the expressions we tend to use to show that we value poetry are tired platitudes.
Just because we can't express our appreciation for something coherently doesn't necessarily mean that it is not really worthy of appreciation.
Just because we can express our negative opinion of something coherently doesn't necessarily mean that is not worthy of appreciation either.
Being incoherent is not the same as being "wrong" and being coherent is not the same as being "right."
It may not be possible to prove that one piece of art is objectively "better" or "worse" than another on an abstract, general level.
In one sense, a painting of a real tree that "really looks like" the tree is a better painting than one that doesn't.
In another sense, the one that doesn't may be a better painting than the one that does (for example, if it demonstrates that the artist has skillfully learned the techniques of impressionism, or simply if more people enjoy looking at it).
A poem about a tree can't resemble a tree in the way a painting of a tree can.
It doesn't really make much sense to talk about "a piece of (instrumental) music about a tree."
A metrical poem with precise meter is better than one with sloppy meter for a reader who values precision over sloppiness.
A metrical poem with sloppy meter is better than one with precise meter for a reader who values something else in the poem (including, perhaps, sloppiness) over precision.
Two non-metrical poems cannot be evaluated in relation to each other on the basis of meter--or they can, but it will only matter to the people who choose to evaluate them in that way.
Our favorite poems are the ones we like the most, unless we can include poems we don't like among our favorite poems.
Most people would think that you can't have a poem you don't like as your favorite poem.
If we define "favorite" in some other way--as "regarded as most likely to be successful" in some context, for example--it might make sense to speak of a favorite poem being one we don't like.
Personal preference isn't the only reason for being interested in something.
Some people find poetry more interesting because it raises these kinds of issues than because of whatever is "in" the poetry itself (or they may be equally interested in both).
It's easier to teach people objective facts about something than to teach them that they should (or shouldn't) like it.
Sometimes the objective facts about a poem (when and how it was written, its publication and reception history, etc.) can influence our feelings about the poem either positively or negatively.
Sometimes people like things just because they know a lot about them.
Not all things are equally easy to like just because you know a lot about them. One might develop a fondness for the subject of fungus because of one's expertise in fungology and thus be able to say on that basis along that one "likes" fungus, but a holocaust scholar with a great deal of specialized knowledge about concentration camps would generally never claim to "like" them (even though the conditions for the holocaust scholar's interest in them are in some--though not all--ways the same as those for the fungolist's interest in fungus).
The reasons for studying something and the reasons for liking something are not always the same, but sometimes they may overlap.
Reasons for liking things, when those reasons are different from the reasons that arise as an effect rather than as a cause of one's specialized interest, are generally related to some quality believed to be possessed by the things themselves.
Some people who like cats will tend to like poems about cats simply because they are about cats--or more precisely, because they are written by people who like cats for people who like cats.
Some people who like cats like poems about cats that vividly capture some feeling or impression they themselves have had or might have had about cats: for example, the way they brush their paws over their whisker when cleaning themselves, or the way they wiggle their haunches when stalking prey. They like these poems because the poems in some way bring them closer to the experiences they associate with their love for cats.
Some people who don't particularly like cats might still like a poem about cats if it is able to produce in them the same vivid sensations as those described above, purely because they admire the poem's ability to render sensual impressions. They might like a poem about fungus (or even Auschwitz) for the same reasons.
It is more acceptable to say that one likes a poem about Auschwitz than to say that one likes Auschwitz (in the sense of being interested in the topic of Auschwitz as a theme for study, say). It's still a little sketchy, though.
Some people like poems that are like language or logic puzzles, in which there is something to think about and finally "get."
Some people (not all) who like poems built around vivid imagery [wow, at first for some reason I mistyped imagery as injury] dislike poems that are like puzzles because they distrust intellectual cleverness as an aesthetic raison d'etre, if not entirely.
People tend to have familiar categories that they summon up to explain why certain poems are unsatisfying: categories like "glib," "sentimental," "cerebral," "trite," "pretentious," "academic," etc.
Many of these terms could be replaced in given instances with terms that are roughly synonyms but that throw positive rather than negative spins on the poems in question. For example, "elegant" for "glib," "emotional" for "sentimental," "smart" for "cerebral," "traditional" for "trite," "ambitious" for "pretentious," "theoretically informed" rather than "academic," etc.
All poets are "language poets" in that all poets use language to write their poems.
There isn't actually a "School of Quietude" (like an institution with that name in Des Moines or somewhere).
Not all poems rhyme.
