Department of English

Center for Poetry and Poetics

Center for Poetry and Poetics (formerly The National Poetry Foundation)

The Department of English is home to the Center for Poetry and Poetics, an internationally recognized center for fostering the study of modern and contemporary poetry. Established in 1971 by Carroll F. Terrell (1917-2003) as a center for Pound scholarship, the Center’s mission was expanded by Burton Hatlen (director from 1990 until his death in 2008) to include the entire tradition of innovative poetry from modernism to the present day. The Center for Poetry and Poetics publishes numerous books on poets and poetry under the National Poetry Foundation imprint, and a scholarly journal, Paideuma, edited by Professor Benjamin Freidlander with a second-year graduate student work-study assistant. The Paideuma archive is available through JSTOR. 

The Open Field

The Open Field is a literary magazine devoted to publishing short form fiction, poetry, mixed-genre writing, and visual art by the undergraduate community at the University of Maine. The Open Field is run by a rotating group of English students in the creative writing concentration, who make all of the aesthetic and editorial decisions.

Class Projects

Both undergraduate and graduate students in the English Department work closely with faculty to develop their skills as writers, researchers, and scholars, and to produce documents that would be candidates for academic or professional publication. Some examples of student work and class projects are archived on our Class Projects page.