The mandate of Influency Salon is to build closer reading practices and polyphonic criticality among poets and writers about their own work and to interconnect various discursive receptive communities in the academy and within writing and cultural audiences so diverse critical angles of reception can become more mutually conversant. The publishing project has evolved in relation to "Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon," a lecture/reading course curated and presented twice annually since 2006 by Margaret Christakos within the Continuing Studies Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto. A pedagogical presentation context, each 10-week session presented eight guest poets appearing twice: reading from their own work and delivering a sustained essay on a colleague. To date, over fifty poets have taken part, preparing extended talks that simply don't occur elsewhere in Canada: poets become essayists, listen to each other, deeply measuring the importance of their work, among a salon of registrants who have also read the work and are writing responsively to and into it.

For the new online publication Influency Salon, Christakos has curated a founding editorial group of fifteen members poet-critics. The online magazine is a virtual parallel to the course's in-person depths, and while it will bring into much wider public view some of the writing that was initially produced within the course, this online salon will produce new critical interactions with poetry emergent from diverse aspects of Canadian literary community. Each of the issues features three substantive original essays by Influency guest poet-essayists, accompanied by audio readings by the poets under discussion, and introduced by the issue's editorial group. These are accompanied by shorter critical writings called "measures" on our feature books and hybrid critical engagements called "outflows." Our vision is to build the social, critical and discursive spaces and voices that matter to a vibrant and innovative poetics culture in Canada, and to present these on the web to encourage transmission and relevance to international poetics.

Smaro Kamboureli will act as the Critic in Residence, offering a critical response to the poets' own creative and critical contributions, and TransCanada Institute.