Role
According to the laureate's official Web site: "The Poet’s role is to encourage and promote the importance of literature, culture and language in Canadian society. Federal legislators created the position in 2001 to draw Canadians’ attention to poetry, both spoken and written, and its role in our lives."
The Parliament of Canada Act states that the laureate may:
- Write poems "especially for use in Parliament on important occasions"
- Sponsor poetry readings
- Give advice to "the Parliamentary Librarian regarding the Library’s collection and acquisitions to enrich its cultural materials"
- Do anything else: "perform other related duties at the request of the Speaker of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Commons, or the Parliamentary Librarian."
The laureate serves at the pleasure of both the Speaker of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Commons, with the maximum term of office set at two years.
The position comes with an annual stipend of $20,000, up to $13,000 in travel expenses annually, a budget for administrative expenses and translation/adaptation into Canada’s second official language.
Read more about this topic: Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate
Famous quotes containing the word role:
“Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”
—John Lennon (1940–1980)
“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)