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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 March 2026

Our anthology committee has spent a very interesting and exciting few months putting together the poems submitted for our forthcoming anthology, Timberline and Shoreline: Celebrating the enduring legacy of poetry in Maine. This anthology was collected to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Maine Poets Society, or the Poetry Fellowship of Maine (as it was known in 1936).

Our secretary, Jeanne Julian, and I had a fascinating visit to the Dyer Library in Saco last year, to browse through the archives of MPS held there — far sparser than we had hoped but nonetheless an insight into our history and our place in the poetry community in our state. I wrote a brief introduction to the anthology and Jeanne has followed it with a interesting history of MPS to accompany the works of over fifty of our members. I hope that when you buy your copy (or copies — because I'm sure you'll want to share it so your family and friends can read your work and the work of other poets in the society) you'll enjoy learning about that.

I must confess that when we embarked on this project, I was extremely naive about the amount of work that would be involved. What could be complicated about gathering together a bunch of poems and publishing them? Luckily, our other editors — Jeanne, Gus Peterson (our treasurer), Debbie Smith (our VP), Bill Frayer (former secretary) and Ellen White (MPS member) — were more clued-in than me. We also have to thank Gus's father Gary, who nobly offered (or possibly was press-ganged) into giving it a final proofread. I don't know how I could have missed the number of decisions that had to be made about things like font, layout on the page, page numbering, placement of poet's name and acknowledgements of previous publication, style of biographical notes and many more.

We also owe a vote of thanks to all those members who sent in pictures that might be used as a cover picture, and especially to David Hyde whose beautiful photograph depicting both timberline and shoreline we chose from many lovely entries. And of course, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to all the members who sent in so many wonderful poems. It was quite a task to choose from them only two from each poet. The biographical notes on each poet were a treasure too. I am so glad we have such a wonderful variety of poets here in Maine.

Among the many decisions we had to make about the anthology was the order in which these poems would be presented. In the end, because we wanted to keep each poet's poems together, we did it alphabetically, and by a glorious coincidence the first poem in the book, by Robert Allen, is about a birth, and the last poem, by Margaret Yocom, is called "Closing Camp."

We want our meeting on May 16th to be the launch party for the book, so I do hope that as many of you as possible will make it to Gardiner for the meeting. Please do write and let me know if you plan to attend in person.

Jenny Doughty,
President, MPS
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