Sunday 12 January 2014

In Praise of Bureaucracy

Just recently one of the members of our local Poetry Society said that they were not going to bother coming to the meetings any more as they were fed up with the half hour spent prior to the main part of the meeting.

This half hour is taken up with what might be called Business where stuff like notifications of poetry comps, guest speakers, finance ( occasionally ), information about various internal or external tasks that need to be done is shared with members.

It goes almost without saying that some of this is a bit boring and most societies have two or three people who like the sound of their own voice or want to push their own agenda.

But the crucial point here is that the Society has now been active for over 60 years. This didn’t happen by accident.

There have been countless other attempts to start other poetry groups in this area. Some have been quite successful in what they achieved but all have fallen by the wayside because they relied on one or two people to do everything. There seems to have been an expectation by the majority of poets that things would happen – a sort of 60’s counter culture where it’s a bit heavy to be involved with Organisation, Man.


Very wrong. A good committee makes things easy. We’ve had a good committee for decades and the experience of this shows that the quality and quantity of the poetry actually increases.