Hmm …

… The search for meaning in a new generation of Poets & Readers — PoemShape. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Helen Vendler wrote a whole book on Keats’s Odes, and Ode to Autumn, and still couldn’t explain why it’s a great poem. We innately recognize and feel the genius behind the poem, but ask any reader what point or argument Keats was making, and the whole poem begins to feel like a zen koan. Can a poem be great without making any point whatsoever? 

Is this meant to imply that a koan has no point?
I have long thought that Archibald MacLeish was right on target in "Ars Poetica":

A poem should not mean
But be.

Which doesn't mean a poem doesn't mean anything. Just that it isn't some sort of acrostic. To borrow a line from Alan Watts (speaking, I believe, about koans), it is like "a pebble dropped in the well of the mind."