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.

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

Long hot summer days (after a great deal of rain…) and I’m almost too hot to even think about writing. Luckily I am taking a set of classes with a wonderful poet, Mark Doty, which has challenged me to my limits with assignments and given me a terrific group to get feedback for them. If you haven’t taken classes or workshops, I highly recommend these as a good way to improve your craftsmanship and a way to get productive feedback. It is very gratifying to see from our Treasurer’s report that some of our members have made use of our opportunity grants and are using them in this way. I hope you find it interesting to read the reports of their experiences.

I share my poems with my husband as my first reader, and he usually loves them, but I know that his response is to me rather than to the art. Much as I love him, and love getting positive feedback, I also really value the kind I get from a group that says “this poem might work better if….” I don’t always agree, of course, and I don’t always follow the recommendations because we all need to have some faith in our own ideas, but often it points me in the direction of where a poem could be made stronger or shows me where something that is very clear to me is far less so to another reader.

One of my tactics (as I usually write on the computer rather than on paper) is to keep all my drafts on a single document. When I have got to a point where I feel stuck, or I can feel that a change would make a noticeable difference, I copy that draft and paste it below the previous one, and then continue to work on it. That way I preserve the earlier version as well as making changes. Usually at the end it is quite different from the way it started.

I am a great believer in playing. It’s so vital for children, and it’s the way they learn, but it’s also vital for us as adults. Anything we write is an act of creation. We can always make it different, the way we might go shopping and try on one outfit after another to see which works best for us. What is the worst that can happen if you try something in a poem and it doesn’t sound good, or doesn’t work well? You can always try it again. And again. And again – all in different ways.

I’m not sure a poem is ever finished. It just gets to the point where you want to let it rest. I’m told that artists feel the same about painting, so I’m guessing that all creative acts work that way. Let’s celebrate our own creativity!

I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in our next hybrid meeting. The last one went well, so we’re giving it one more try with borrowed equipment and then we’re going to splash out recklessly and buy our own!

Jenny


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