They confront us with our ever-incomplete understanding, forcing us to leave behind what we thought we knew. So we might as well make peace with the fact that they're always going to give us trouble. One of the great benefits of going on and working with koans subsequent to your first is that they show you, again and again, in myriad ways, the limitations of words and concepts. Every koan is showing us this and forcing us to see through these words to experience the reality that they're pointing to. In presenting one's take on a koan, one may not explain them in the ordinary sense.
Explanations are dead.
One has to find a way to demonstrate them, in a living, dynamic, and direct way. Anyone who has worked on many koans knows how habituated the mind is to words and concepts, and how they blind us to experience itself. There is an outstanding passage by Heinrich Zimmer that Roshi quotes in The Three Pillars of Zen . It refers to certain types of meditation, but we can read it as a wonderful tribute to koans. For it is by doing things that one becomes transformed.