I see this as you stating the same thing many great poets eventually do with a sigh when all they see around them are people in love with how well they can masturbate through words (“Look at how nude they are, how sexy, how shocking, how they allude to nature, to the heart, the good, the dark, the esoteric. Look! Look!! Look how I cry!!!”).
Why do people enjoy this? I want to read poems that move like wrecking balls. And that transform me into the building they long to touch. // Tomás Q. Morín
Good poetry is the difference between just having sex and making love. It is making love; it’s old news and the odds are against you before the very act and yet you participate. And you participate with an open-heart because you know that you’ll never reach that sweet release all emotionally closed up like that (this is old news). It holds yet destroys you completely, and it’s drawn-out yet over too quickly. It’s hard to describe.
But you know what I mean and in that knowledge is exactly where it resides. Good prose makes good fantasy, sci-fi, drama, romantic comedy, and documentary. Good poetry is bare but not proud of it, it’s anti-fantasy, and unromantic even when it is. It’s not really funny and it doesn’t sell well. It’s that art-house film that your weird friend that’s not really your friend dragged you to that moved you so wholly that you were still sitting after the credits were done and the room was dark and your friend just smiled (I recognize you with surprise. In this poem you are by yourself. // Catherine Wagner). It’s that impossible to get up. What you don’t realize is that your weird friend dragged you to this film, and only this film, because all the other ones sucked like an adult performer on her worst day (sure, the sex and performance was there, but…).
It’s that movie with all those reviews that start with “I finally stopped putting this off for some reason and watched it. This is hard to explain, but I’ll try,” because that’s exactly what it’s desperately trying to capture, the unexplainable and desperately avoided. And the impossibility of describing why I enjoy poetry is inherent in that, that it’s a capturing of everything I can’t.
Simply put though, you don’t enjoy reading poetry because of Miley. She’s everywhere, and she has the audacity to call herself inspired and inspirational.