Readers: Who Reads Modern Poetry?

This chapter examines the question of readership for modern poetry. It will outline a brief historical narrative of modern poetry and its readership, with examples from the 1960s, 1970s, 1990s and the twenty-first century. These narratives, the chapter will demonstrate, often involve a dichotomous division between “accessible” “mainstream” poetry and the “difficult” or “inaccessible” poetics of the avant-garde. In an effort to contest the underlying assumptions of these dichotomies, the chapter will outline alternative configurations of accessibility, drawing upon the Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and the scholarly work of Robert Sheppard and Peter Middleton. These re-configurations are then exemplified further via a brief analysis of the readerly processes in Allen Fisher’s poetry and poetics. Finally, the chapter will conclude with quantitative observations about the current distribution of poetry publications.