The Toronto Poetry Club - Should I join?

I recently learned that someone has restarted the Toronto Poetry Club on Meetup.com.

I am not much of a poet, but I am very tempted to join just so I can hone my poetry skills.

Two years ago the Toronto Poetry Club was an ever growing presence in Toronto's poetry community and then the president of the club (who had some serious issues that made him difficult to deal with) forced out the vice president. After that incident the club faltered without the leadership skills of the vice president and the president, unable to cope with stress fell off the wagon and let the poetry club slide into oblivion, which led to the Meetup group being deleted in December 2013.

But there is good news. Several poets from the group has convinced the old vice president to come back and restart the group from scratch, becoming the new president of the Toronto Poetry Club.

With these changes the group is now back on track with strong leadership, but is low on members since the old group (which had 300+ poets in it) was deleted and all their contact info was lost.

The new president also is bringing back the old Poetry Circle Meetings, which was far less intimidating for people who were too shy to stand up on a podium. Reading poetry aloud in a poetry circle is much less stressful for people who have difficulty with public speaking because the circle is more of a social atmosphere and welcoming.

One of the failures of the old president was that he was so focused on trying to make money off of the poetry club. He was trying to turn the poetry club into events where he could charge people fees for attending. The new president is having none of that. Every meeting is free to attend and there is a donation jar that goes towards supporting the website.

And all these factors tell me that this is a club that I would like to join. It makes me happy because a group like that needs strong leadership that is willing to put in the extra hours to make the group a success and isn't going to become a greedy jerk who wants to squeeze every member for their money.

As if poets weren't already poor enough.

But things are looking up. New leadership, new poetry meetings, a more comfortable / less formal meeting environment. These are positive changes.

So my feeling is that the Toronto Poetry Club has my vote of confidence. I will be signing up for the next meeting for sure.