Note from the Senior Poets Caucus on the 2025 Member Motion

In light of board and staff’s fiscal concerns and their excellent plans for 2026, including the 60 for 60 initiative, the Senior Poets Caucus will make a friendly amendment to its own motion on June 24 to move the League to hold an in-person conference in 2027.

Background

The League has not held an in-person national conference since 2019 in St. John’s. Up until then, the conference was held annually since the League’s founding in 1966 in cities across Canada, with programming evolving to answer the times as well as changing member needs.

In 2020, the League successfully rose to the challenge posed by the pandemic by migrating the national conference online in a reduced format and has continued to stage it online in the years since. It’s justified doing so initially because Covid continued to pose a threat to members’ health in group settings and because it has allowed members who might not have otherwise been able to attend an in-person conference for a variety of reasons, including scheduling conflicts, time availability, and cost. However, what the League had once mounted as an in-person, two- or three-day-long AGM has devolved solely to holding the annual business meeting that is required by law—as well as, in recent years, a discretionary town hall—so the membership may ratify the League’s plans and budget for the year to come, the previous year’s audited financial statements, and other pertinent business requiring member input, including the reorganization of the League. Other programming, like the Anne Szumigalski Lecture, that was presented at in-person conferences prior to 2020, is now either offered online at other times of the year or not offered at all.

The Senior Poets Caucus commends past and present board members as well as the League’s staff for piloting the League through the past five difficult years. However, we believe that League members have suffered from not meeting face to face. It’s time for the League to resume holding an in-person national conference for the benefit of the poets it serves and of poetry itself.

What this motion aspires to renew in the League

The Senior Poets Caucus believes that an in-person national conference held over two days or more will allow the League to foster a greater sense of community than it can online by bringing members physically together in an atmosphere of mutual encouragement through panels, lectures, and workshops of vital interest of them.

An in-person national conference gives members, whether emerging or established, the opportunity to share their experiences and insights with one another in ways that build genuine relationships and present opportunities for future collaboration. It breaks down barriers, with members less isolated from one another geographically, culturally, and generationally.

An in-person national conference allows members to connect and learn from their peers, many of whom have editing and publishing expertise, as well as from key stakeholders in writing and publishing who before the pandemic were often invited to attend, including book and magazine publishers, granting-agency representatives, librarians, booksellers, and reading-series and festival organizers.

An in-person national conference facilitates networking between members and provides them with multiple opportunities to discuss, both formally and informally, their work with one another. This generates a shared sense of belonging to a poetry collective that embraces the country, a cohesiveness that is composed of many thriving poetry communities. An in-person conference allows poets to exchange or sell their books at a book table. Most poets increase their sales and readership at in-person events.

An in-person conference allows the League to host workshops and panels on publishing, writing practice, and the business of writing that are delivered by writers who represent diverse aspects of and approaches to poetry in Canada. It provides members with the opportunity to celebrate robustly the nominees and winners of League’s many awards, including the new Lifetime Achievement Award, that the League administers each year. Keynote speakers may deliver the Anne Szumigalski Lecture, speak elsewhere during the conference, and, importantly, converse with an audiences physically seated before them.

An in-person national conference allows the League to celebrate the poetry community of the city where it is held by featuring local writers on panels, inviting them to give the Anne Szumigalski Lecture or other keynote addresses, and to give workshops. Local poets will naturally compose a significant portion of conference attendance with the fees they pay defraying conference expenses incurred on behalf of all members wherever they live. Some local poets may be willing to billet members from other parts of Canada and beyond who might not otherwise be able to attend an in-person conference. A local poet or poets may also be available to help plan and stage the conference.

Poetry is a solitary profession. When gathered together, members may more easily meet peers similarly passionate about poetry, whether they are new faces or old friends, beginners or writing veterans. In-person national conferences have an energy to them that is so exciting, they inspire the introverted and gregarious alike to stay focused on their work and to continue writing.

An in-person national conference breaks down the isolation that technology-driven, online meetings only partially address because participants, however connected they may feel through WIFI, are still siloed in their own homes. Online-meeting platforms do not rise to the challenges faced by those rural members who may barely be on the grid due to the unreliability of their internet service—or even be off-grid due to its total absence. Being online is its own kind of privilege.

Aspects of an in-person national conference (the annual business meeting, the Anne Szumigalski Lecture) may also be streamed live and/or posted online post-conference to allow members unable to attend physically in any given year to benefit from the conference programming and to participate in the decision-making process.

An in-person national conference allows members to initiate and maintain life-long personal and professional friendships and mentorships. The long-lasting benefits of in-person contact at at an in-person conference, whether in the whole, in groups, or one-on-one, are invaluable, for they help poets to grow and succeed as creators. This, we believe, is the core reason why the League of Canadian Poets was founded and has lasted as a vital organization for almost sixty years.

In absence of such in-person national conferences, the Senior Members Caucus fears that members will increasingly lose touch with one another, let alone ever meet. We fear that the League itself will lose touch with its origins, its evolving reasons to be, and its ability to maintain a legacy upon which present and future members may build a living poetry that will thrive in the decades to come.

Members can find additional information on the Senior Poets Caucus proposal, including what an in-person conference could look like, in their member package.