Poetry Society EGM Commentary

“trustee n. (plural trustees)

A person to whom property is legally committed in trust, to be applied either for the benefit of specified individuals, or for public uses; one who is intrusted with property for the benefit of another; also, a person in whose hands the effects of another are attached in a trustee process.”

-Wiktionary

I write this having, just this minute, got home from the Poetry Society EGM which ran today from 14:00 until about 17:10. I write this post in the hope of giving as much undiluted/opinionated fact from the meeting whilst summarising points that will take some time to arrive from the full minutes.

I stress the fact that I make this post hastily from notes taken in longhand from a very long and wordy public discussion. If you feel that I have made important omissions or misrepresentations then there are instructions at the end.

As in my previous post, I wish to present these facts in a logical order, rather than a chronological order, under suitable subheadings.

Why the lack of Twitter coverage?

The meeting was held in a lecture theatre with practically no WiFi or 3G coverage. The only person who was able to give regular updates was Jacob Sam-La Rose, a member of the Board. Interestingly, he did this using the #posocegm tag advertised on Silkworms Ink yesterday.

I suggested halfway through the meeting that it was not appropriate for a member of the board to be using the official Poetry Society Twitter-Feed, let alone be the only source of live information to the outside world.

Resignation of the Board and Vote of No Confidence

The first thing announced by the Board is that they would all resign, effective of September. The reason for this deadline being that this is how long they felt it would take to ensure a smooth transition to a new board.

By the end of the EGM however, the Board’s resignation was not enough to satisfy the members present and there was a Vote of No Confidence in which 302 voted for, 69 voted against and 11 abstained.

Discussions very soon moved onto calls from a few (not all) members from the floor who wanted an immediate resignation from some/all members of the Board. It was pointed out that there need to be at least 5 board members at any one given time. Kate Clanchy asked members of the Board to publicly stand down at the meeting – she did not have the full support of the room, despite saying “I speak for everyone here...” several times.

The Root of the Issue (via John Simmons)

The meeting began with an overview of the issue from John Simmons. Here is the narrative that I garnered from it…

It was made absolutely clear that the entire issue stemmed from the breakdown in the working relationship between Poetry Society Director, Judith Palmer, and Poetry Review Editor, Fiona Sampson.

Judith Palmer was single-handedly behind the Arts Council proposal this year which was met with an acceptance and the promise of a substantial increase in funding.

The increased workload of such a successful grant created increased stress for Judith Palmer and it was the view of the Board that she should take an extended vacation whilst some of her workload was delegated.

Around this time ‘people’ were publicly commenting on the personality clash between Palmer and Sampson and the Board felt the need to address this. The Board decided that, for a fixed 3 month period, Sampson would report to them directly rather than go through Palmer due to their untenable working relationship.

John Simmons suggested that there was not time to discuss this properly and so they went ahead with this arrangement without Palmer’s knowledge or consent. Palmer soon resigned with immediate effect.

For perceived legal reasons, the Board and the Society were silent about this. Simmons stated that “our silence fuelled the flames of conspiracy”.

The situation, as it now stands, is that there is no guarantee of the Arts Council Funding ever finding its way to the Poetry Society and all relationships between all the Society’s stakeholders are marred. More damaging still, the Society’s recent expenditures on legal advice make a significant financial strain on them.

Key elements of this narrative were picked apart and scrutinised over the course of the meeting, as I hope to discuss later on in this post.

The Hitler Video

The Board mentioned that, of all the criticism and conspiracy theory that they faced during the past months’ events, the most hurtful was the ‘Downfall’ parody video which likened several Society members to Nazis.

Paul Ranford – Finance Manager

First participant in the Q&A session was Paul Ranford, the Society’s resigned finance manager and teacher of Business Studies. His argument in full can be read here. I shall provide some of the key points of what he (very eloquently) said…

Ranford began by saying that ‘today is a time for sensible words… sensible words.’ He is incredibly concerned that the Society’s Arts Council relationship has been upset and that the Society’s reputation has gone from its absolute height to its absolute lowest.

The financial reserves built up by the Society over 100 years are at roughly £120,000 – if recent legal fees were to continue then this would be very easily depleted. Ranford made mention that talks had been had about valuing the Society’s current Betterton Street property in light of potential funding cuts.

Ranford finished by stating that the Board absolutely failed to support their director when she needed it most and that the ‘sensible words’ he had heard today were not enough.

Large applause soon followed.

Katy Evans-Bush – Where was the HR procedure?

Katy, who has extensive experience of working in the public sector, coupled with extensive experience of conflict resolution, intimated that she was shocked at the apparent lack of procedure involved here.

How is it that the Poetry Review Editor was able to unofficially voice a grievance directly to the Board, circumnavigating the Director and have the issue dealt with that way? Is there a clearly laid out procedure for HR conflicts in the Poetry Society and were they followed?  Was a formal grievance ever even officially filed?

The answer?

There was no formal grievance ever filed and the Board admits that the measures taken were drastic. It was felt by the Board that the two employees needed ‘breathing space’ from each other.

Evans-Bush pointed out that Palmer was never consulted over this ‘breathing space’ and therefore enforced breathing space is tantamount to exile and banishment.

At this point, Niall O’Sullivan turned to me and mouthed the word ‘bull’s-eye’.

Tom Bell, Union Official – What about acas?

Why were none of the professional organisations such as acas not consulted so that trained professionals could guide the resolution in a fair-handed way? Bell made it clear he felt that a Board who intervenes without use of official grievance procedure should resign.

Barbara Cumbers – FS’ contract and JP’s resignation

Barbara asked to know where the grievance between JP and FS stemmed from, and she inquired as to whether it was linked in with comments made about FS receiving increased pay and reduced hours. Paul Ranford produced the minutes which corroborated that Sampson’s working week would be reduced from 4 days to 3, and that he was asked not to reduce her pay.

The response to this was that the arrangement was only temporary (this phrase was used a lot today).

Cumbers’ secondary question was why was it deemed inappropriate for the Director of the Poetry Society to work through her notice period?

The response to this was that “there were a number of occasions where process and procedure weren’t being adhered to [by Judith Palmer]”.

Legal Advice

The Board of Trustees have been seeking, at great expense, professional legal advice having supposedly received several threats of lawsuits from Judith Palmer. Here are a few discussions that arose from this issue:

Question from the floor: Why were you going to the same lawyers used by Rupert Murdoch when there are several law firms set up who are specifically geared towards advising small charity operations such as the Poetry Society?

Answer from the Board: We didn’t know that such companies existed.

Question from the floor: Did you ever receive written legal threats from Judith Palmer with regards to this issue?

Answer from the Board: No. Only verbal threats.

Question from the floor: If you were dealing with a stressed employee, whom you were attempting to support through times of great difficulty, why did you treat a verbal threat as anything other than a ‘heat-of-the-moment’ thing and go down the path of paying for expensive legal advice?

Answer from the Board: The threats were more than a single incident – several people were threatened with legal procedure by JP on a variety of occasions. It is in the interest of any company to seek advice when threatened with legal action.

Pre-Interval – A call for a vote

Philip Polecoff (thank you to Tammy for spelling) suggested that the Board could be nothing but completely ‘lame’ until September and it could only be be damaging to have a stagnant Board resolved to do nothing until then.

(Cut for commercial break)

The Interval

The conversations taking place during the interval were frantic, emotional, passionate and, to an extent, factional. Some felt that they wanted the Board gone immediately following a Vote of No Confidence. Others felt that such a knee-jerk response in an emotional state would be more to do with vengeance than what is good for the society.

The Build-up and The Vote

Laurie Smith announced the motion that, in light of today’s meeting, the members of the Poetry Society present today wish to make a vote of no confidence against the Board of the Society.

Alan Brownjohn stated that he cannot endorse such a vote as it was in no way mentioned on the meeting’s agenda and that it would be nothing but damaging to all concerned. There was an amount of support for this opinion by those who felt that nothing should be finalised in the heat of such an emotive meeting.

Amidst all this was an obscene amount of umming/ahhing about the propriety of a show of hands, a ballot, a poll or any other form of proportional representation. Much grumbling ensued and the vote was finally passed. The results, as you know, 302 voted for, 69 voted against and 11 abstained.

Interim Board Members

4 candidates were put forward to be co-opted as Board Members in the interim between now and the September AGM. Amongst them was Michael Schmidt – questions were asked over the propriety of a PN Review employee being a Poetry Society Trustee but the Board seemed not to see this as a large enough conflict of interest to put him out of the running.

Andrew Motion

No massive story here – I just had a short chat with him after the meeting about his experiences of Jamie’s Dream School. Really Nice Bloke in person.

Everything Else

So, I’ve surely missed a lot of very important details out of this report. I’m sure that, in my furious note-taking I may have misrepresented certain issues. If you feel that this is the case, then please do write to me (poetry@silkwormsink.com) or tell me over twitter or in the comments section of this post, and I will happily happily happily add edits and appendices to the end of this piece of writing.

Appendix 1: The Trustees

The Board of Trustees at this meeting were Laura Bamford (chair), Emma Bravo, Duke Dobing, Alan Jenkins, Anne Jenkins, Wendy Jones, Barry Kernon, John Richmond, Jacqui Rowe, Jacob Sam-La Rose, John Simmons.

Phil Brown

Poetry Editor