'Be Able to Call It a Poem'

A few poets are born into each generation. A measure of the rareness of their gift is the proliferation of wannabes who make poetic gestures, relish the title “poet” and write undistinguished prose. I was given an issue of American Poetry Review, a magazine I haven’t looked at in forty years. It contained not a single poem. Even the nominally prose feature was largely unreadable. I was reminded of the literary magazine, Lit Bits, I edited in high school.  

How good it is to discover a true poet, Jane Greer. I don’t know her work deeply. I’m relying on what I’ve read online, such as “Thirty Years’ Creeper War”:

 

“Into its roots I thrust my spade,

each spring, to kill it where it cloaks

and climbs my lovely house, and chokes

all other green things there arrayed.

With my bare hands I pull new shoots

before they batten and start to braid

themselves into a wild cascade.

I never manage to kill the roots.

 

“I lay thick fabric on the yard

to snuff the beast, but my crusade

founders: no earthly barricade

will work. Old errors—they die hard:

I planted this plague decades past,

so casually, and am now betrayed

by its propensity to last.

It’s not the worst choice I have made.”

 

Greer reminds me on occasion of Janet Lewis. Both might be described as “domestic” poets. They often write about homebound objects and events, like gardening and family, though that describes only the most superficial aspect of their poems, the “content.” Neither is a composer of “messages.” Their poems are made to be heard. They are constructions of sound. Greer recently spoke on the podcast “Let the Goat Go,” where she talks about some of the silliness I encountered in American Poetry Review:

 

“The irritant that I’m talking about is giving names to writing that doesn’t deserve those names or labels. Grandiose, pompous names. You’ll understand what I mean in a minute. Those words, grandiose and pompous, indicate dishonesty, pretending that something is what it’s not, or pretending that we are something that we’re not.”

 

She refers to non-sonnet sonnets, prose poems and so-called “erasure poems.” These are avant-garde fripperies, the sort of thing that’s been cranked out for more than a century and calls itself “edgy” or “transgressive.” The idea is to attract attention by being reflexively contradictory, like an unhappy adolescent. Some of Greer’s poems approach light verse, as in “Trending,” while “Like Feathers" is casually masterful:

 

“Like feathers, they drift in

from somewhere out-of-frame,

and none of them can name

where they have been.

 

“Too briefly do they stay

in-frame, falling, lifting,

lightly slanting, drifting

down and away,

 

“with perfect gravity,

into the waiting grave.

They love us but behave

so thoughtlessly.”

 

Let’s give thanks for Jane Greer, who writes like a grownup for grownups, in a spirit of common sense. On the podcast she says: “So a focus on language, the use of meter and rhyme, and the use of metaphor, these are base level features that differentiate poetry from prose. Maybe one of those features can be missing, but not all of them, and still be able to call it a poem.”