Writing through stories of experience from my work as an English teacher educator, I problematise and offer possibilities for poetry teaching (primarily at the secondary level) in the US educational context, characterised increasingly by high-stakes testing and the practices of audit culture. Winnicott's (1971) concept of the “good enough mother” offers literature scholars and teachers an image of a “good enough reader” capable of sustaining authentic poetry reading and teaching in these standardised times. The good enough reader values aesthetic experience; provisional interpretation; and re-reading and lingering with texts that pleasure and confuse. The good enough reader serves as a partial, human response to what reading and poetry have become in a testing culture. She reminds us that we read poetry to understand private and shared life more clearly and to live more attuned to self and world.