The Prime Minister’s Literary Award winning poet Melinda Smith recently commented that 80 per cent of the audience for poetry in Australia is made up of the ‘specialist reader – a reader who not only loves books and loves words and reads a lot but has also got a degree in a postgraduate qualification in English and has read an awful lot of poetry and cultural theory’. Smith expresses a hope that poetry aimed at ‘the general reader’ can be acceptable in Australia. Smith’s award is proof that it can, but I can’t help wondering at her assumption that the majority of acceptable poetry in Australia is ‘inaccessible’ – and that the non-generalist, let’s say specialist reader makes up 80 per cent of the readership of poetry. This is not just a reader of poetry, but someone who reads mainly a certain type of poetry – ‘the richly layered and allusive works that are created by and for people with tertiary education in literature and cultural theory’ (Smith).

The poets who poetry with that intent, if they exist, would be likely to say the reverse – that ‘accessible’ poetry makes up 80 per cent of the readership, and that their work is marginalised. So at least two schools of poetry are imagined in Australian poetry. I want to stress immediately that these categories are bogus. While there are many different tastes among readers, and many kinds of poetry, is the grouping of poets into schools of any use to anybody except poets? 

The general reader may or may not exist. He or she is often imagined as someone who reads widely across genres – is as informed about the latest poetry as he or she is about the latest biography or science book. The general reader, if she exists, should not be underestimated. She can deal with complex and layered poetry and may even prefer it. It’s difficult to imagine what a specialist reader might be – someone who only reads a certain kind of poetry? And is there a real distinction between readers who might enjoy a self-professed accessible poetry such as Smith’s rather than the complex and layered poetry of a Murray? I’m not sure that I care whether my poetry is read by a specialist or a generalist reader, as long as it is read. 

All good poetry has complexity. And as Chris Wallace-Crabbe notes in Read It Again, ‘poetry has many houses’. Perhaps rather than trying to distingiush between ‘accessible’ and other kinds of poetry, we should look to quality. I would argue that great poetry transcends all categories and finds it own way to all kinds of readers. And my ideal reader would be someone capable of enjoying the very best of all kinds of poetry. When poetry works, it speaks: whether it is dense and allusive or (apparently) immediately graspable.