What makes a poem good?

Some people enjoy cliches.  They are easy to understand, require absolutely no knowledge of anything except how to put letters together to make a word, and give instant gratification to the fast food reader.

Some poetry sites -- and some writers -- thrive on writing and reading such simplicity because it generates lots of activity in a short period of time and that makes the site look good as well as the "poet". This is about as helpful for poetry as Hallmark is.

To the point about gender -- although I believe confessional "I" poetry may be gender biased, I've read some horribly girly work by men.  I've also carried on conversations on other sites for months without realising that the person I was talking to actually thought I was male.  So I'd say that it entirely depends on how much a person is defined by gender as to how much their poetry is. 

And to Fred:  one of the most important aspects of poetry is communication, of that there is no doubt and should never be.  However, that communcation need not be what I intend.  Once it's written and posted, it's out of my hands.  Just like the experiment with describing an elephant, the same words will have different meanings for different readers.  Some of my great successes -- as people rate these things -- have been poems that originally meant nothing like the interpretations.  That's ok, I have communicated something.  It's as much in the hands of the reader as the writer -- or rather, it's MORE in the hands of the reader.  The writer only has one shot at it, the reader can come back and add more at leisure.