WINCHENDON, Mass. (AP) – The title is a fancy one. But at 79, this small town’s official poet laureate still gets up to make the doughnuts.

Step inside the Donut Shop on Center Street and meet J. Patricia Holohan.

Just about everybody in town stops by the tiny corner shop at least once a day – the electrician, the postman, the college professor – to get a cup of coffee, a fresh-baked snack and a rhyme.

“It’s just something I’ve always done,” Holohan said of her poetry. “My poems are my way of remembering things. They are my mementos. And sometimes a way to vent.”

Twice widowed with eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, she writes about the goings on in town and the shop – from politics and snowstorms to a little girl in her best fancy dress. The happy times and sad ones. And blueberry muffins.

“She’s a real asset to the town,” said Town Clerk Lois Abare. “Both her poetry and her doughnuts.”

Many states and some cities have poet laureates. And Massachusetts has produced a number of national poet laureates, including Louise GlJuck, who currently holds the title.

Still, few towns as small as this community of 9,600 people in the hills on the New Hampshire border have so embraced a poet.

The town once known for its wooden toy, furniture and clothespin factories is still a blue-collar sort of place. It has seen better times. Many of the storefronts downtown are vacant. And the state has threatened to take over its schools for poor performance.

“We’re very pleased to have Pat as our poet laureate,” said Burton E. Gould Jr., who chairs the board of selectmen and often stops in the doughnut shop. “I don’t believe we’ve ever had one before and it’s sort of grown on us.

“Her poetry is nothing formal, but it comes from the heart and that’s where it should come from,” said Gould.

“It gets a lot of people to sit down and talk and she’s a very nice woman with a big smile.”

“It’s a perfect fit,” said James Pelletier, a local poet who proposed the idea. “She’s the embodiment of her neighborhood,” he said, comparing Holohan’s writing to the painting of folk artist Grandma Moses.

“We’ve had other poets in town, but Pat shares,” said Julia White Cardinal, the town’s librarian. “It’s a generous thing to do.”

Holohan shrugs off the accolades, saying “I’m just the doughnut lady.” Still, she hopes she can help inspire some of the town’s young people.

In a corner across from the bakery case, atop the shelves of hand-crocheted baby clothes and toys that Holohan makes and sells, is a thick stack of proclamations from local, state and national politicians and a few copies of her self-published book, “Tales from a New England Neighborhood.”

“It is not only a charming, but wonderful, thought to imagine you on Central Street not only serving your customers, but also serving the community with your poetry,” Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote in a congratulatory letter. He recalled his own “odd career … managing General Foods Desserts Division by day while writing poetry by night.”

Born in the foothills of the Ozarks, Holohan’s formal education ended at a small Catholic high school in Helena, Ark. Her mother died when she was 11. And her copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses” was her solace.

“Paper treasures, from our secret heart, Hopes and hurts, whys and when, and for me, remembering,” she wrote in one poem. “Written words to cement dreams, to heal hurt, then to dream again.”

She met her first husband while he was stationed in Memphis, Tenn., during World War II, and he brought her home to his native Massachusetts.

Her career as a business owner began at age 60. She had been working in the bakery of the local IGA supermarket. Two days after her second husband’s funeral, she arrived at the store to find it locked and closed for good. So she and the bakery manager borrowed money on their homes to open the doughnut shop.

Fittingly, it was one of her customers, Arthur Marley, a recently retired professor of creative writing at Mount Wachusett Community College, who took an interest in her writing.

“I had some poems out on the counter and he read them and offered some suggestions,” she recalled. “I didn’t know who he was. Then some of the other customers told me he was a professor up at the college. I couldn’t believe it, a professor reading my poems. He’s my mentor. Even now when I’m ready to give up, I picture him standing in the kitchen door saying, “You can do this.”‘

“She’s a special lady,” Marley said from his retirement home in the Cape Cod community of Harwich. “I like her poetry and I like Pat, too.

“Some of her poems are just jingles and maybe she meant them that way. But some of her occasional pieces, especially her memories of World War II and the Dust Bowl, have real quality,” he said. “She’s a very intelligent lady with no pretense and a very real strength. She is the real thing.”

AP-ES-06-04-04 0916EDT