What’s really funny about these comments is that the editor admits to being confused as to your friend’s poem meaning. You probably haven’t read much poetry since you dislike it, but many poems are incomprehensible to most people and still get published in The New Yorker. There’s rarely one concrete meaning. Poetry like painting is often open to interpretation.

I write a lot of poetry and not just on Medium. I write haiku, humor, sonnets, and free form stuff. I dislike “spoken word” because I think it lacks rigor. Much of it sounds like an essay read aloud.

Several of my poems have been published in literary journals (with actual, hard copy print editions!) and one recently won over more than 5,000 others in a contest. That said, some of my poems are better than others. But the real success of a poem is when it triggers a forceful recognition of truth or sparks an emotion in the reader. Surprisingly enough, this can happen with poems that, from a critical standpoint, ain’t so hot.

Do you feel the same about song lyrics? Lyricists are poets who want to make money, and a lot of them do, even with pretty lousy stuff. Dewey Bunnell’s “A Horse With No Name” is a prime example. Did you ever read those lyrics? Cringeworthy throughout.

AHWNN was a number one hit, a gold record, and the album went platinum. Bunnell has a net worth around $12 million at a time most hitmakers from his era are broke or dead. It didn’t matter that the lyrics were awful. People liked the song anyway.