LOL I know exactly what you're talking about. At the time I was in grad school, back in the late '90s, that sort of writing was the rage. I called them "academic poems," because they were largely written by people within the academic community for their peers: naval-gazing musings filled with archaic references. I found inspiration back then in Asian forms: image-based, easily accessible, using small moments to delve into greater truths. And yet, all these years later, there are still many people who believe that poetry must be complex and nigh incomprehensible to be worthwhile.

Now, I'm not saying a poem should just be a diary entry broken into lines (although there's space for that, too), but I much prefer poems that may read easily and yet, upon a second or third reading, the reader discovers deeper layers of meaning.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. :)