One wonderful thing about metrical poetry is that no one needs to know an iamb from a hole in the ground in order to enjoy it. People are born liking a rhythm regular enough to be noticed and varied enough to be interesting, and we have to be taught otherwise. In human cultures the play of meter across speech is apparently universal.
We also like to know how things work, and many people find their enjoyment of poetry to be enhanced if they can recognize the basic meters. If we also want to make poems, such a skill can be immensely valuable, and, along with rhetoric and logic, it is teachable, unlike vision or judgement or taste. It is a shame and a waste to expect any but the most extraordinary young writers to depend solely upon their inspiration to make poetry, but that is what we do when we fail to teach the skills that enabled generations of writers to produce enjoyable, memorable journeyman's poems — like much of Wordsworth.
J. V. Cunningham put it like this:
For My Contemporaries
How time reverses
The proud in heart!
I now make verses
Who aimed at art.
But I sleep well.
Ambitious boys
Whose big lines swell
With spiritual noise,
Despise me not,
And be not queasy
To praise somewhat:
Verse is not easy.
But rage who will,
Time that procured me
Good sense and skill
Of madness cured me.
Even so, there's no denying that good and even great poetry gets written without the traditional meters and by poets who have only a passing acquaintance with them. But it's perniciously absurd to argue that critics of English poetry do not need to be able to recognize the most characteristic of English meters, the iambic pentameter. That Charles Bernstein either lacks that skill or can't be bothered to use it when he's arguing may say nothing about his poetry. It may be that he or Marjorie Perloff or other similarly challenged critics have useful or important things to say when they confine their attention to things about which they care enough to use what skills they might have. They still deserve ridicule when they are ridiculous, and there's clearly no reason at all to take them seriously when they write about meter or metrical poems.
8:38:19 PM 
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