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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

2026 brings the organization to its 90th anniversary. To recognize the importance of that, we’ve created an Anthology titled Timberline and Shoreline with poems by over 50 of our current members. It is available through Amazon.

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 July 2026

I gained a new level of respect for the publishing industry earlier this year as the anthology committee wrestled with putting together everyone's contributions to "Timberline and Shoreline" and formatting them to meet the printer's exacting requirements. As a society, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to our wonderful secretary, Jeanne Julian, whose mastery of the technical skills required was beyond anything we might have expected. It certainly saved us the money we would otherwise have had to pay the printers to do that level of preparation. As it is, we have ended up with a beautiful book that is a tribute to the poetic skills of our membership and a fitting celebration of our ninety years as an organization under one name or another.

These challenges did, however, have one consequence: we were unable to get our volumes in time for the May meeting, so we are having the official launch at the September meeting. Our hospitality chair, Diane Hunt, is laying on a special lunch for this, and as well as our normal contest event we are including a reading in the round by the poets from their work in the anthology. I hope that as many of you as possible will be there in person to celebrate and of course we always welcome on Zoom those members who live far away or have mobility issues.

The prospect of celebrating the anthology together also made me think about why these gatherings matter beyond the publication of a book. Although it is gratifying when people read and comment on your work, and publication is something we all celebrate, I don't think publication is the reason most of us write. You can be a poet for the sake of your own expressiveness without ever having been published. I find writing a poem often helps me to formulate what I think, to notice in retrospect something about a sight I've seen, or a memory I carry, or discover what I really want to say about an idea. Sometimes I surprise myself!

Writing poetry is an art (or a craft if you prefer). Like all skills it takes practice. It's not that there is a right or wrong way to write a poem, just that there is the challenge of finding the words, rhythm and music that allow another person to experience what we have seen, remembered or imagined. I have been fortunate to find in Maine Poets Society a group of people to whom that activity is meaningful in itself. I enjoy sharing my work with them at our Readings in the Round on Zoom and in turn hearing their work. Every reading reminds me how many different ways there are of seeing the world. Listening to one another's poems sharpens our own ears as well as our own voices. I look forward to hearing your voices at our next Reading in the Round and at the meeting in September.

Happy summer,

Jenny Doughty
President, MPS
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