Jane Greer (poet)

Jane Greer (b. 1953) is an American poet. She founded Plains Poetry Journal, a literary magazine that was an advance guard of the New Formalism movement, in 1981, and edited it until 1993. Her poetry collections include Bathsheba on the Third Day (1986) and Love like a Conflagration (2020).

Plains Poetry Journal

In 1981, Greer founded Plains Poetry Journal, a literary magazine that was an advance guard of the New Formalism movement.[1] In her "Editorial Manifesto," Greer wrote: "Through history, the best poetry has used certain conventions: meter, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, painstaking attention to diction. Not all good poems use all of these conventions, but if a poem uses none of them, why call it a poem?" She decried the sort of conversational free verse "that reads like random thoughts randomly written," and wrote, "All these attempts at unfettered individuality sound alike." In 1984, Writer's Digest named Plains Poetry Journal the "#1 Non-paying U.S. Poetry Magazine."[2] Greer edited Plains Poetry Journal until 1993.

1980s-1990s

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Greer's poems appeared in the anthologies A Formal Feeling Comes, edited by Annie Finch, and A Garland for Harry Duncan, edited by W. Thomas Taylor, and in many journals, including Yale Literary Magazine, First Things, America, and Chronicles. For Chronicles she also wrote the monthly “Letters from the Heartland” column. Her ideas about poetics and esthetics are elaborated in a short essay, "Art Is Made," in A Formal Feeling Comes.

Bathsheba on the Third Day (1986)

In 1986, Greer's first poetry collection, Bathsheba on the Third Day, was released in a limited edition of three hundred copies hand-typeset and hand-printed by Harry Duncan at The Cummington Press.[3]

Return to publication

After nearly three decades working as a civil servant for the State of North Dakota, teaching writing at Bismarck State College, and working in advertising and marketing, Greer returned in 2019 to publishing her poems in journals, including Literary Matters, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Better Than Starbucks, E-verseradio, Modern Age, First Things, and Angelus, as well as publishing reviews in journals such as Literary Matters and Angelus.

Love like a Conflagration (2020)

Greer’s second poetry collection, Love like a Conflagration, was published in May 2020 by Lambing Press (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). The collection of new poems also included a reissue of Bathsheba on the Third Day, and received strong advance endorsements from Samuel Hazo, James Matthew Wilson, Anthony Esolen, Ryan Wilson, C. C. Pecknold, A. M. Juster, and Jennifer Reeser.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Love like a Conflagration, Lambing Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 2020
• Bathsheba on the Third Day, The Cummington Press, University of Nebraska, Omaha, Neb. 1986.
• Greer, Jane. “Rodin’s ‘Gates of Hell,’” A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women, Annie Finch, Ed., Story Line Press, Brownsville, Ore., 1994. Pp. 79-80.
• Greer, Jane. “Professor Dobbs to Jayleen Nichols on Semantics and the Fact of Myth,” A Garland for Harry Duncan, W. Thomas Taylor, Ed., W. Thomas Taylor Press, Austin, Texas, 1989. pp. 37–38.