This is terrible news. No one who knew the conference at its best can do anything but regret its dissolution. Other conferences now compete for the poets who used to attend West Chester, so those poets are not left without any options. But the friends that I met at West Chester will not all attend the same conference in the future, so I cannot count on seeing most of them in any one spot. The size of the West Chester conference made for a wide range of panels and workshops, and I don't think any of the competing conferences can match it at that level. I still value the contact and exchange of ideas at a conference on formal poetry, so I will not give up attending one each year. That conference will probably not be at West Chester from here on. I will miss it.
Susan
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