Equanimity: "... the weird noise so beloved to poetry junkies is mostly screened out when people want poetry to serve this proxy function. (Incidentally, it's that noise, and the poetry junkies' love of it, that bugs the shit out of certain gatekeepers, and is almost invariably what prompts vocal hostility to poetry.)"

Yes, it's almost as though there were a frequency that some people couldn't hear, or could perceive only as an annoying "noise."

It struck me today that there are probably some people who attempt to read poetry silently to themselves, and without even "subvocalizing." People who literally aren't hearing what they are reading. Of course we are taught in school that hearing the language we are reading will only slow us down.

People who really don't like poetry and want it to serve some spurious "proxy function," in Jordan's appropriate phrase.

And those gatekeepers. We all have our favorite examples of those.