To the poet who feels the need to explain that you won't understand her poem before sharing
If I may offer a bit of unasked for advice: never feel like you have to explain to a poetry audience that your poem wil be unfathomable.
If your poetry isn't as, shall we say, accessible as the other work you've heard that night, that doesn't mean you need to warn us that your work IS in fact genuinely inaccessible. Just read your poem and let the chips fall where they may. If I point out to you, as a matter of fact, that other inaccessible work has hit the stage that evening I am not being an ass; you simply think the other inaccessible work is worse than yours and doesn't bear explaining because it speaks for itself. Let me assure you that inaccessible work always speaks for itself.
You expose a prejudice of the audience when you assume that we will not find merit in your inaccessible poem, despite the fact that you have essentially confessed that the poem is obtuse from the point of creation. Even bad poetry can have merit. Maybe their is a word choice to admire, or a rhythm that sparks something in a person, or a jaw-droppingly plain symbolism that is so cliche and right at the same time. Even inaccessible poetry is capable of generating a genuine feeling in the right audience member.
If you think you don't belong at that reading, as you intimated when asked about your motivations after the show about our exchange, it isn't because we don't understand your work. YOU don't understand your work. But if you think you must apologize for it before you read it because the audience might be expecting a night of work they can understand, then I implore you to go elsewhere, not because we don't understand your work (even you don't understand it), but because you shouldn't perform in front of people you can't respect. And if you can do that to a room of strangers, if you can write off a roomful of people you don't know as being cater-feeders needing to be spoon-fed the chum of your undercooked poems, then you probably shouldn't go to any poetry readings outside of your living room.