Reports yesterday (and confirmation today) that Vancouver is to have its own civic poet laureate (kudos to Yosef Wosk, SFU’s Philosopher King, for offering to underwrite the position’s honorarium for the first three years; and who knew until now that the going annual rate for the laurelling of poets is $5k per?).

Council approved the position at their meeting last evening — can we now expect to see the city’s bards bent intently over their nursed cappuccinos as they whip out sheaves of sonnets to pad their resumés, racking their (collective) brains in an attempt to recall whether ‘twas Shakespeare, Petrarch, or Spenser who’d mandated a-b-a-b, b-c-b-c, c-d-c-d, e-e?

Here at t&p we are thrilled to see poetry institutionalized. The knowledge that leagues of poets were running wildly through the city’s streets has always unsettled us. Better by far to trap and tame one of them, at any rate, and so reduce our risk of being broadsided by an unexpected burst of iambic pentameter across the bows.