It Must Give Pleasure, It Must Change

We can all rest easy now. A judge ruled on what makes a poem.
In a twist that Alicia will appreciate, the plaintiff apparently argued that a poem in rhyming couplets is not a poem. The judge ruled otherwise, noting that “a poem sometimes possesses rhyme or meter, though this is not necessary.”
An old law prof of my husband’s, who is now a judge, told his class: “Lawyers and poets are the only people who read every word.” While a post on attorney-poets would be fun, I’m thinking more of judges, and judging, and how difficult it is to separate our enjoyment of poetry from judging and condemning. Most of us love a very few poems to distraction, and hate everything else. Critics who fawn over the Bad or dismiss the Good come in for even greater ire. Is there any possible corrective for this judging, judging, judging?

For me, one way to get out from under it is to go to these livejournal sites: Breathe_Poetry and greatpoets. (There may be more I don’t know of.) Their moderators publish a poem a day, like Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and the Writer’s Almanac, but instead of being professional editors with branded sites, these moderators seem to be students and enthusiasts just posting a (usually) contemporary poem they are taken with that day. Some they discovered in class, some through their own reading.
Calls for poetry to be more “accessible” leave me cold. But I like seeing what turns up on these livejournal sites because they may come closest to representing an “ordinary reader; the unknown interlocutor.” At first it was like tuning in to Top-40 radio: the poems don’t usually run to my taste. But then something turns my head, some bit of music: last week there was a string of poems from Ciaran Carson to Seamus Heaney to Les Murray (none of whom I can say I’ve been drawn to in general) that pulled me in on Breathe_Poetry. And a poem by Christine Hume with a terrifically twisty ending on greatpoets. The discipline of suspending judgment has introduced me to poems I would not otherwise have encountered through my usual channels. They really are like poetry radio stations, and the moderators are not judges but deejays.