'Picture the World Without Her in It'

Out of the blue a poet sent me a pdf of his latest collection and, out of politeness, not gratitude, I thanked him. The guy can’t write. Or rather, he can produce unlineated, remarkably banal prose. Someone, somewhere, told him he was a poet, likely a teacher or another “poet,” and he believed it. To that degree, it’s not his fault. He was born into a literary culture without respect for the discipline of craft and commonsensical intelligence. 

It’s sinking in that poet Jane Greer is dead. I thought of her while trying to read the pdf described above. I’m not on Twitter but I almost daily read her tweets because she was so funny and seemed to delight in things without being an attention-seeking idiot about it. From 1981 to 1992 she served as founding editor of Plains Poetry Journal, which I regret not having known at the time. For a taste of Jane’s spunk, see this opening to her review of collections by two of our best, X.J. Kennedy and R.S. Gwynn, published in the October 1987 issue of Chronicles:

 

“American poetry has for the past few decades been going through what can only be called an adolescence, discarding rules and conventions simply because they existed. Poetry and all the arts go through a healthy siege of anarchy every so often, but this was more like terrorism than a revolution; these revolutionaries, unlike the Romantics, had no idea of what to substitute for what they’d destroyed. Instead, they simply wrote, spilling their guts down the pages of fashionable and underground journals in two-word-wide, uncapitalized entrails of self-obsession.”

 

An evergreen doing double-duty after almost forty years. Good poetry does many things but chief among them ought to be reliably producing pleasure, ever striving after what Nabokov called “aesthetic bliss.” I didn’t know Jane well. I’ll repeat myself: she was funny, a quality I crave like oxygen. See the tribute to Jane put together by her peers, fellow poets, in New Verse Review, including one of her poems published in an earlier issue of that journal:

 

“In none of her other ages had she noted

her age or its burden and bounty of expectations.

The future was as flexible as the past,

and, in between, moments like unstrung pearls

strewn across velvet grieved and gladdened her

and always astonished her with their perfection.

There was no nothingness: there was only being.

 

“Slowly she wakes from what had seemed a dream

to realize that this is her final age—

of indeterminate length and quality.

Things are ending, or have ended, or will end.

The pearls are strung with care, it is quite clear.

There is no nothingness—but she can almost,

some days, picture the world without her in it.”