Badly hurt and beautifully loved : the poetry of John Laws

Bob Ellis once described radio megastar John Laws as 'the worst poet in the whole history of the entire universe' - a position for which there are surely many contenders, Ellis included. Laws's poetry may be a mere sideshow in the larger media event which he represents, but it's taken on a curiously symbolic role in terms of the Laws persona: what James Cockington called its 'sensitive/macho style' complements the quasi-Byronic pose of the alienated loner with a social conscience which Timothy Hall outlined in his 1985 biography John Laws: Life by Misadventure. On the other hand, the poetry's aesthetic quality - or lack thereof - has been used to ridicule Laws's other, more powerful and politically influential roles. The Sydney Morning Herald, in particular, enjoys an acrimonious relationship with what its Stay in Touch column calls His Holiness The Tonsils, or HHTT, going so far as to conduct a parodic poetry competition 'in the John Laws genre' in 1999. And yet Laws's five collections have all done remarkably well. Cockington described him as 'Australia's best-selling poet of the '70s' and, excepting poets set on the HSC English syllabus, there is no reason to doubt that. Hall claims that his later books sold 25,000 copies each. To put this figure into perspective we need to remember that print runs of books by even well-respected Australian poets rarely exceed 500 copies. Laws's publisher was the doyen of the 70s coffee-table and cook book, Paul Hamlyn. His poems clearly appealed to a larger audience than that which normally consumes verse, but does that mean they're any good? What do we mean by 'good'? Should we care?