Encountering poetry …

… Points of Entry - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The first thing to note about the wrangling over accessibility is that it encompasses an array of anxieties, some of them self-contradictory and most of them unimportant. Often it’s just a proxy for a centuries-old squabble between people who like their poems plain-looking and people who like them a little more rococo. Because both styles can be immediately appealing to readers, it’s not clear what access has to do with any of this. Further, arguments over accessibility typically fail to reckon with the fact that almost everyone in the American poetry world works in the university system, which is essentially a multibillion-dollar access-­granting machine. If you spend your life talking about “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” in front of bored 19-year-olds, then you are poorly positioned to argue that the experience of poetry is, or should be, beyond the reach of general readers. If poems were cookies, you’d be a Keebler elf.