Logo for Maine Poets Society.
Link to Our Voice & Home page.
Link to the About page.
Link to the Meetings page.
Link to the Gatherings page.
Lilnk to the Membership page.
Link to the Contests page.
Link to the Craft Talking page.
Link to the Stanza newsletter.
Link to the Resource Links page.
Link to the Contact page.


About MPS

History
The Waterville Poets Club and the Dover-Foxcroft Poetry Circle joined in 1936 to form the Poetry Fellowship of Maine. In 1993, the name was changed to Maine Poets Society to reflect the organization's changing emphasis on a statewide network of writers sharing their work.

More about our history can be found here: History of the Maine Poets Society

Affiliation
The society is affiliated with the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (NFSPS). Maine Poets Society membership fee includes NFSPS membership and allows our members the opportunity to participate in a variety of contests and events each year. For more information, visit NFSPS online at www.nfsps.com.

Who's Who at MPS

  Board Members

President’s Message

I’ve been away traveling in France and in brushing up my rusty French one of the things that became clear to me was how much I relied on stock phrases. Now, admittedly, my French is tourist-functional rather than conversational, so a lot of interactions revolve around phrases such as where is... how much... and I need... (as well as ‘white wine please,’ and ‘yes I’ll have the pâté and yes I do like Camembert’). However, using those trusted phrases helped me function.

This made me think about how easy it can be to return to familiar language when we’re figuring out how to convey what we mean in a poem. We know these terms and we know that our readers will know them too and understand what we mean. Even in prose, however, there are limits to people’s enjoyment in reading well-worn phrases. In poetry, what we really enjoy is surprise.

As speakers of English, we enjoy the use of a language with the largest vocabulary in the world. Other languages also have large vocabularies, and each language has its own history and nuance encapsulated in its vocabulary, but English is a thief of other languages. Like Autolycus in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, it is “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles”.

I grew up in Yorkshire, where village names reflect their origins in Anglo-Saxon conquest of earlier tribes, and in Viking raids. They end in words like ‘thorpe’ (settlement), ‘thwaite’ (clearing), ‘beck’ (stream) and ‘by’ (farm). There is a famous hill in England called Torpenhow Hill, which accumulates three words for hill - tor, pen and how - since invaders obviously asked a native what the place was called and got whatever the name for hill was at the time.

A friend once told me that if you pronounce any English word ending in -tion with a French accent, you may end up with a viable French word since so many of those words stem from the Norman conquest of Britain and the incorporation of French words into English. See also the Latin that stemmed from the Roman occupation, and the Germanic words that came with the Saxon invaders. The British habit of invading other countries also led to the incorporation of Indian words such as pajama, bungalow and verandah into English. In the US we have a history of incorporating Native American words into the language as well.

As writers of English, then, we have a toolbox containing the richest possible collection of synonyms and a capacity for nuance better than any other language. We continue to absorb words into the language from new technology—I grew up never having heard of many words that are commonplace today, because the technology hadn’t been invented.

Delve deep into your toolboxes!

Happy summer

Jenny Doughty,
President, MPS
 © Maine Poets Society.