The big poetry prizes, embittered critics claim, are judged by a cabal of sinister academics determined to scare away readers. Not so, writes T S Eliot Prize judge Sean O'Brien

As with the Booker for fiction, it often seems that, to the media, annual poetry prizes have become the raison d'être of poetry publishing, rather than a means of drawing attention to poetry itself. The combination of bile and fantasy they attract certainly suggests as much. The £10,000 T S Eliot prize, it was suggested last year, was decided by a typical bunch of self- interested insiders - a rather unlikely description of the judges, the poets David Constantine, Kate Clanchy and Jane Draycott.

There may be more of the same this year, both from embittered press commentators and from irredentist cyberpoets of the avant-garde "backslash/ampersand" tendency, seething in their fastnesses in Scunthorpe, Bloxwich and beyond. Having been asked to serve as chair of the judges for this year's T S Eliot prize, I thought it might be helpful to describe what actually takes place. It may be disappointing to learn that the judges don't sit around in extensive subterranean headquarters, stroking white cats and opening trapdoors to feed their opponents to the piranhas. So what do we really do? In my case, I read 80-odd books and discussed them with Sophie Hannah, poet and novelist, and Gwyneth Lewis, the first Welsh national poet. The process is long and difficult, and not even a poet would call it lucrative.

Individual reward aside, what is the point of poetry prizes? By celebrating outstanding books, they affirm the continuing place of poetry in our cultural life. But what is that place? Let's be realistic. The American poet Dana Gioia memorably described the present-day position of poets as resembling "priests in a town of agnostics". Most people don't know what to do with poetry, but are unwilling simply to abandon it. By "people", I mean educated regular readers - those who read novels, biographies, history and even literary criticism. But faced with a collection of poetry, they feel uniquely powerless, and this is a horrible insult to their evident literacy. How are they supposed to read poetry? Unsurprisingly, this often turns out to be poetry's fault.

Much of the problem lies in how readers are introduced to poetry. At school or university, teachers are often uneasy in dealing with a subject they themselves may not have been taught well. In the press, while the better newspapers make an effort to cover poetry, there's never enough space. Poetry is most often reviewed in batches, taking up less room than a first novel or a biography. The reason for this may, again, be editorial unease, but is mostly economic: consider the sources of advertising revenue. Poetry does, of course, receive coverage when there's a scandal - Larkin's letters, the agonies of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Betjeman's infidelities - but this directs the reader to biography rather than the work itself. The life is more available, and raunchier, than the art.

Then there is the difficulty of getting hold of the stuff in the first place. The active, inquiring reader is an awkward customer. You're a reader of poetry: where would you go to buy it? Waterstone's or Amazon? That the answer is probably Amazon means there's progressively less choice for the new reader browsing for clues in the bookshop. Libraries, meanwhile, have patchy collections, often driven by short-term schemes.

You could, and in fact should, join the Poetry Book Society. But other solutions have been offered. They usually involve making poetry seem easier and more accessible, shifting it from its economic half-world towards the commodity status of the novel. The results can be seen in the numerous pastel-coloured anthologies displayed in W H Smith and Waterstone's. There is a striking coincidence there between "accessibility" and a loosely defined air of spiritual uplift not a million miles from the wisdom of Patience Strong. Worse, there is also a determination to steer the reader safely away from the potentially alarming fact that poetry is made of language.

It's impossible to read poetry without coming up against the medium itself. In contrast to most other writing, poetry demands that you notice language, engage with it, consider the form it takes and its angle of address. Attempts to read poetry "just for the content" run into the sand. In fact, people are reading form and method, but too often lack the vocabulary to describe them. As Robert Frost put it, "All the fun's in how you say a thing", and, to reapply Yeats's words, much of the pleasure lies in "the fascination of what's difficult". Yet it seems that our whole public culture is hostile to difficulty.

This is not the view of an elite removed from the traffic of everyday life, though such people and their creatures do exist. Instead it's found among many poets teaching in universities and elsewhere, who find that the biggest battle is to persuade students to take on the responsibilities of form. It's no accident that two recent books on poetry are so bluntly titled: Jeffrey Wainwright's Poetry: the basics and Terry Eagleton's How to Read a Poem. Because poetry is literally "free to page" anyone can have a go, and most of them are busy doing so, often without reading much if any poetry at all. The balance between the actively poetic and the merely expressive is skewed in favour of a subjectivity that prefers to measure itself against its own convenience rather than accept a challenge. It's not a crime, but it contributes to the permanent crisis of poetry.

Yet there's no reason for despair. Much of the art worth having enjoys a fractious and unequal relationship with its times, demanding a quality of attention that only a minority of the audience is equipped or inclined to supply. Everybody's welcome, but in the end poetry is what it is. In Auden's phrase, it "survives/in the valley of its saying".

Where should readers go? Aside from the shortlisted books, and naming only a bare handful of possibilities, the curious might look into the work of the great Irish poet Derek Mahon, the contrasting English modernism of Roy Fisher or Peter Didsbury, the lyricism of Kathleen Jamie, or the salty wit of Ian Duhig. The point is to start and keep going. Poetry is a diverse and endlessly rewarding art, richly imaginative, musically charged, frequently enigmatic, ultimately addictive and designed for the long haul. The T S Eliot prize honours an enlightened and hopeful persistence in what is, after all, the transnational art of these islands, as well as rewarding the individual winner. Meanwhile, you there, Mr Valiant-for-Truth, scenting conspiracy, watch out for the piranhas.

Sean O'Brien is professor of creative writing at Newcastle University and a vice-president of the Poetry Society

The T S Eliot Prize 2006 shortlist readings takes place at UCL Bloomsbury Theatre, London WC1, on 14 January. The winner will be announced on 15 January. For tickets and details go to www.poetrybooks.co.uk

Poetry Prizes

National Poetry Competition
Award: £5,000
2005 winner: Melanie Drane, "The Year the Rice-Crop Failed"

Whitbread (now Costa) Poetry Award
Award: £5,000
2005 winner: Christopher Logue, Cold Calls

Cholmondeley Award
Award: £2,000 to each winner
2006 winners: Alan Jenkins, Mimi Khalvati, Jo Shapcott

Eric Gregory Awards
Award: £4,000 to each winner
2006 winners: Fiona Benson, Retta Bowen, Frances Leviston, Jonathan Morley, Eoghan Walls

Forward Poetry Prize
Award: £10,000 (Best Collection)
2006 winner: Robin Robertson, Swithering

Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
Award: gold medal
2006 winner: Fleur Adcock, Poems 1960-2000

T S Eliot Prize
Award: £10,000
2005 winner: Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture

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