Arts Council restores Poetry Society funding
The Poetry Society has had its funding restored by the Arts Council after a period of calm following the row last summer that led to a spate of resignations, an emergency general meeting, and the board of trustees agreeing to stand down. The Poetry Society said: “Funding had been withheld since July and was restored once the Poetry Society had met a number of conditions demonstrating good governance, following the election of a new board of trustees in September 2011.”
Stephen Irwin, chair of the board of trustees, said: "This very welcome news signals the beginning of a new period in the life of the Poetry Society. We have a wide-ranging and ambitious programme of work for 2012 which we look forward to delivering for the benefit of people of all ages up and down the country."
At the height of the row last summer the society’s director, Judith Palmer, quit. She has since resumed her post. At the end of last year the trustees maintained in a statement that much of the publicity about the trouble at the time was “inaccurate and some of it was hurtful to staff … Unfortunately, problems of governance were reported wrongly as a purely personal dispute.”
Julian (Admin)
Mon 13th Feb 2012 11:56
An interesting point, begging the question: where does Write Out Loud fit in The Poetry Society's world, or it in ours? In fact, what interests me is how this phenomenon of the live poetry/open-mic/live-lit/spoken word genre/movement... how it is viewed by the world of those who still seem to consider "printed-on-paper" as the only legitimate form of publication for poetry. Or am I wrong?
Write Out Loud, and its associated colleagues in the 500+ monthly events listed on the gig guide, seem to consider the live reading of un-page-published poems out loud to be a legitimate form of publication, for all its lack of editorial filtering.
I am just reading an interesting new book on the subject. Review soon.
I am a member of the Poetry Society.