Bad at what? I agree most poetry is bad at hitting my subjective quality markers, at tickling my sense of sophistication and meaning. I don't even like the maj

Bad at what? I agree most poetry is bad at hitting my subjective quality markers, at tickling my sense of sophistication and meaning. I don't even like the majority of poetry from poets that I love. I fell in love with Cummings as a teenager and checked out his collected works and realized quickly that while I found some transcendent (and worth the slog through what wasn't), I also found the majority of the work of one of the most famous 20th C poets pretty meh. Even for those who can outrace Sturgeon's Law (which I think Cummings achieved), it's an art, not or science, hit or miss. And alongside issues of quality, skill, and probability of hits there will also always be subjectivity in how a work hits each member of an audience. Still... bad for what? As well as being an art, poetry is a humanity. The two chord punk rock song is definitely doing less and less sophisticated things than a Palestrina motet or even Steve Reich's studies in subtly changing simplicity and we lose something when we can't appreciate sophistication and intricacy (with or without being able to articulate the specifics). But we also lose something when we can't appreciate simple expression even with mediocre articulation. Bad poems are probably doing something well enough alongside being bad at meeting various standards.