'She’s Gone, She Was Here and Then Gone'

Mike Juster tells me Jane Greer – “North Dakota Jane” – a gifted poet with an ever-ready sense of humor, has died, age seventy-two. In her final Tweet, Jane wrote on July 3: “I’ve been in the hospital and am not sure when they’ll release me. I have diverticulitis and a perforated colon. Prayers appreciated. Personally, I’m praying for and dreaming of large full cups of ice water.” After that, nothing. On July 4 I wrote to her in an email: “If you're still in the hospital tonight, I hope you can at least hear the fireworks.” More silence. I find no obituary as yet posted online. 

The truest way to honor a dead writer is to read her work and keep it alive. Jane sent me signed copies of her most recent books, both published by Lambing Press: Love Like a Conflagration (2020) and The World as We Know it is Falling Away (2022). Collected in the latter volume is “First Elegy,” about the death of a mother by cancer, originally published in First Things in 1994. After surgery and chemotherapy, implacable death returns:

 

“We had barred all the doors to Death, so Death came in the window,

bit through her heart in a moment, she was that easy to undo.

It was no big deal to Death, so nonchalant, sure of itself,

 

“it knew lots of ways to do it, clever mongrel puppy

worrying a rag, one eye on us, but the rag was mother,

she's ruined now, we cannot press her back together,

and our displeasure makes no difference. Death is happy.

 

Greer reminds us: “my relatives have all caught Death, sooner or later, / it’s in our chromosomes, it runs in the family.” She concludes the poem:

 

“.. . . she’s gone, she was here and then gone, and we seem to keep forgetting,

she can’t mix us an old-fashioned, or buy us a perfect present,

what we had is all we have, what we thought was forever isn’t,

we phone each other often, but Death is always on call-waiting.”

 

I wrote about Jane and her work here, here and here.

[Jane Greer’s obituary is posted.]

'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.”

'It Is Always Summer, Always the Golden Hour'

I fight the urge to wallow in nostalgia but it seeps back in like moisture in an unfinished basement. I take that image from my childhood home. The walls and floor were bare concrete. Stacks of newspaper and lumber felt flesh-like with dampness. Down there it was always chilly, even in summer.

The poet Jane Greer is seventy-two and lives in North Dakota. For twelve years she edited the Plains Poetry Journal. She is a poet of domesticity and technical rigor, Midwestern in her good-humored seriousness, a Roman Catholic who reveres the wonder of creation. I’m from Ohio, a semi-Midwestern state, but there’s nothing homogenous about the Midwest and its people. She’s rural, I’m urban/suburban. Most of the stereotypes don’t hold, though Midwesterners indulge them and laugh. I remember being surprised when a buddy and I got lost in Illinois trying to outrun a tornado that never happened. We found ourselves in Lewiston, where Edgar Lee Masters moved with his family at age twelve. It served as his model for Spoon River. And the surrounding fields of corn felt almost claustrophobic.

 

I read Those Days: An American Album By Richard Critchfield (1931-94) when it was published in 1986. Like Greer, Critchfield was a North Dakota native, and the book recounts his family’s history in that state and Iowa. I remember associating it with Willa Cather and Wright Morris. Greer, I discovered, reviewed the book in the April 1987 issue of Chronicles, and it begins with a passage any writer would be delighted to hear:

 

“This is a book I wish I’d written, a love story of the largest and best kind. Like most people, I remember my childhood, that eternal summer, in a glow of happy forgetfulness, simply out of pleasure. Richard Critchfield ‘remembers,’ as if he had been there, his parents' lives and society before he was born, and shows why it’s important to remember and to go back even further than our own birth: Because like it or not, we are attached. We are not historyless like Adam, breathed out of nothing; we’re drawn from the narrow end of a real and compelling vortex—history—vivid with blood and bone, passion and fear, as it touches down to make us in the here and now. Part of everything that was and will be, we move up the funnel of history to make room for those whose history we will be.”

 

I envy Critchfield’s reconstruction of his family’s history, in part because most of mine is a blank. I know almost nothing about my father’s family and only unconnected shards about my mother’s. These people didn’t talk about the past, whether out of guilt or abject indifference, and bequeathed little living memory to their descendants. I’m left with all the questions I didn’t ask.

 

“This is no vague nostalgic trek back to the nonexistent ‘good old days,’” Greer writes, “or mere homage to a loved mother, but a gifted writer’s careful examination of all available resources, to reconstruct the rhythm and immediacy of the past—its sounds and smells, human passions and disappointments. Critchfield has resuscitated those days, given them breath and pulse, and made their relevance to us, now, evident.”

 

Here is “The Light As Thick As Clover Honey,” the first poem in Greer’s third collection, The World as We Know It Is Falling Away (Lambing Press, 2022):

 

‘Here is the square pink house on the green street.

Here is the long back yard sloped to the alley.

Here is the rusty swing, and here is the pup-tent

bleaching the grass. Here is the happy family

like all the others. Here is the sunburnt child

on her blue bike whose streamers are the reins

of a great stallion; here they gallop the world

from home to grandmother’s and home again

on odd brick streets, around the painted bandstand,

through the gap in in the church’s high trimmed hedge.

Here is the small town hugging the river bend,

cicadas rasping out their alien urge,

the light as thick as clover honey. Here

it is always summer, always the golden hour.”

“Eternal summer” in the review, “it is always summer” in Greer’s poem.

On a Phrase by Jane Greer

“. . . I pounce on quiet when I find it.” 

Do you hear that sound? A low vibrato in the distance? Sometimes it swells and the windows seem to rattle. It’s a pedal point reminiscent of hornets in a jar, but less reassuring. It’s the collective drone of chatter, of casually improvident talk. Some are blessed with the absence of the gift of gab. We try to speak only when we have something worthwhile to say, which we know is seldom. This means speech, of course, spoken language, but also applies to written words spewed out as Tweets, etc. Thriftiness in money and words seems no longer fashionable.

 

I encountered the phrase above in Jane Greer’s poem “Motherhood on the One Quiet Night,” reread on Mother’s Day. She first published it in Plough in 2022 and collected it in The World as We Know it is Falling Away (Lambing Press, 2022). I try to weigh the worth of what I have to say before I say it. Not every provocation calls for a response. You’d almost think people were afraid of silence.

 

As Montaigne recounts in his essay “Apology for Raymond Sebond”: “An ambassador of the city of Abdera, after speaking at length to King Agis of Sparta, asked him: ‘Well, Sire, what answer do you wish me to take back to our citizens?’ ‘That I allowed you to say all you wanted, and as much as you wanted, without ever saying a word.’ Wasn’t that an eloquent and thoroughly intelligible silence?”

 

How elegant and rare: “an eloquent and thoroughly intelligible silence.”

 

[The Montaigne passage can be found in The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'The Last Patch of Irretrievable Light'

I sensed in Jane Greer, even through the unreliable conduit of the internet, an ebullient spirit utterly unlike myself, which is why I felt an immediate attraction to her and her excellent poetry. On New Year’s Eve 2024, Jane wrote to me: “Do come to North Dakota! It’s beautiful—7 months out of the year.” She enjoyed laughing. She must have been a fine hostess. She saw the good in people that I sometimes miss and had a gift for inspiring friendship. When she encouraged you, you knew she meant it. She was no softie. She had a tart sense of humor and had a lot of fun mocking contemporary poetry. In the November 1985 issue of Chronicles, Jane wrote in a review of a selection of Stevie Smith’s poems:

“Now, it’s true that every second slim little poetry volume on the ‘market’ today carries, zipped up snug in its jacket, a blurb by some other famous or infamous poet who claims that this new poet possesses a ‘tremendous sense of voice.’ In this usage, voice means . . . well, I'm not sure. I would challenge all such jacket-quoted literati to identify other, unsigned poems by their proteges from a pile of similar—and equally insignificant—others. It should be worth a hefty grant if they can do it.”

Wednesday was the first anniversary of Jane’s death at age seventy-two. The truest way to honor a dead writer is to read her work and keep it alive. Jane sent me signed copies of her most recent books, both published by Lambing Press: Love Like a Conflagration (2020) and The World as We Know It is Falling Away (2022). Here is the final poem in the latter collection, “Gravel”:

 

“My prayers drop to the ground like so much gravel,

salting the path on which it seems I travel.

Who made the path before me? Others praying.

Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh I hear them saying.”

 

The Hebrew word means “holy,” as in Isaiah 6:3: “And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” In her earlier volume, Jane included “Heartwounding Woods,” set in October, the true Poetry Month:

 

“Do you recall the late-afternoon light

oblique in October woods, the slanting gold

carelessly cast, mottling the secret ground?

The smoke of dreams surrendered or attained

hung in the air, and loss and discontent

grew in the still-green dappled undergrowth.

Do you remember, deep in the pungent leaves

as you sat in stippled shade with half-closed eyes

and there moved across your face and toward the night

the last patch of irretrievable light?”

'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, and like many funny people she was serious about the important things. 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.”

'A Joyousness That Brings Joy to This Room'

One of the unexpected joys of landing a job more than forty years ago as court reporter for the Palladium-Item newspaper in Richmond, Ind., was the opportunity to explore the remains of the Gennett Record Co., a pile of bricks and mortar on the east bank of the Whitewater River. The company was founded in 1917 as a subsidiary of the Starr Piano Co. In the following decade, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, Earl Hines, Hoagy Carmichael, Muggsy Spanier, Johnny Dodds and other jazz pioneers, as well as country, blues and gospel artists, recorded there. Most importantly, on April 6, 1923, Joe “King” Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band boarded a train in Chicago and rode to Richmond to record nine songs, among them “Chimes Blues,” featuring Louis Armstrong’s first recorded solo. 

Seeing the remains of the Gennett studio added a piquancy to the records. Heaps of rubble and part of a standing wall was all that remained of a sacred place in American culture. A long-abandoned railroad line ran near the factory and I’m told that the sound of a passing train can be heard on one of bluesman Charley Patton’s 1929 recordings. (The narrator of that video is Rick Kennedy, a former reporting colleague at the Palladium-Item , jazz scholar and first-rate piano player.) Often there’s a ghostly quality to early recordings and mystery about who is actually playing. The late Warren Hope published “The Unknown Trumpeter” in the March 1987 issue of Chronicles, preceded by an epigraph:

 

“‘There is an unknown second trumpet man.’

— from notes to a Louis Armstrong album”

 

“For all I know he spends his nights on grates

Clinging to clouds of steam.

Trying to sleep and, maybe, dream

Of when he traveled widely playing dates.

 

“Or it could be he's been retired for years—

Tucked in a nursing home

Where a rare visitor will come

To speak to him and wonder at his tears.

 

“But it seems much more likely he is dead,

A fading memory

Among old friends and family

That soon will fail to trouble any head.

 

“No matter how he lives or how he died.

His life has one plain meaning.

The jubilation of his playing,

A joyousness that will not be denied—

 

“A joyousness that brings joy to this room.

Making me offer thanks

To one who from the nameless ranks

Raises sweet riffs tinged with a sense of doom.”

 

Hope died (an interesting phrase) on May 23, 2022, at age seventy-seven. He captures the poignant sound of old recordings: “A joyousness that brings joy to this room.”

 

In the same issue of Chronicles, the “Letter from the Heartland” column by the late poet Jane Greer is published. Jane died on July 22 at age seventy-two. Like Hope’s poem, Jane’s essay is a meditation, in part, on mortality:

 

“Let’s face it: Self-preservation is not our strongest instinct; is, in fact, an impossibility. We know we’re only tourists here, so why not see the sights before the bus pulls out? Our innocent vices and our mulishness where it matters least are a large part of what makes us human. Humanhood alone has the wits to luxuriate in the status quo—to understand that life is a gift, meant to be enjoyed—and the raw determination to sometimes transgress that status quo if it means a real reward. Humanhood alone can look up from a plate of fried chicken livers, light a cigar, drain the last of the wine, and, perfectly aware that such habits are unhealthy for the body, say, with conviction, I AM okay! You ARE okay!—and be correct. The feast of the soul is a strictly human event.”

'Someone, I Think, Heard the Name I Named'

It’s not fair to think of our dead as “The Dead,” a demographic category that erases all distinctions but absence. My brother (d. 2024) and Jane Greer, the North Dakota poet who died this week, would have had little in common in life. Ken had no use for poetry and he framed paintings and photographs for a living. He was an artist manqué and I knew him all his life. Jane I knew only recently from her poems and the emails we exchanged. Each was a notable individual, distinct, not a statistic, worthy of memory. Memory salvages both from oblivion. In some of us, the elegiac impulse is powerful. By my count, the Summer issue of New Verse Review 2.3 contains at least ten poems memorializing or addressed to those who have died. Here is Victoria Moul’s “I.m. Andrew, October 2024”: 

“Cozen me then, my restive Lord:

The candles in the church blow out

After only an hour or more.

I have forgotten now which saint

Was in which niche and in what stand

I set my candle, when I paid

A few coins, not quite the allotted price,

Or even whom I named

Sidelong while wondering too

Whether the man who knelt

Across from me was married; how

We might afford that flat; or if

I should buy leeks or aubergine.

Attention is

So short and slight a thing, a flame

Snuffed as soon as lit, but all the same

Someone, I think, heard the name I named.”

 

Moul adds a footnote: “This poem is in memory of Andrew Hurley, who died in Paris on 11th October 2024. Andrew’s encyclopaedic knowledge of, and unrelenting enthusiasm for French poetry are much missed by all who knew him.” She speaks for me: “the name I named.” John Talbot contributes “Epitaph of Menophilos” to New Verse Review:

 

“Such days as were my lot I passed in joy

Buoyed in the quickening flux of poetry.

Bacchus was never very far away,

Or Aphrodite either. As to friends:

Not one of them can tell of an offense

I ever did them. I am Menophilos,

A son of Asia, till I left to settle

Far from home in the sundown hills of Italy.

Here I held my ground, and now am held

Among the dead. I never did grow old.”

 

Together, Moul and Talbot edited C. H. Sisson Reconsidered (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Here is Sisson’s “The Absence” (God Bless Karl Marx!, Carcanet, 1987):

 

“How can it be that you are gone from me,

Everyone in the world? Yet it is so,

The distance grows and yet I do not move.

Is it I streaming away and, if so, where?

And how do I travel from all equally

Yet not recede from where I stand pat

In the daily house or in the daily garden

Or where I travel on the motor-way?

Good-bye, good-bye all, I call out.

The answer that comes back is always fainter;

In the end those to whom one cannot speak

Cannot be heard, and that is my condition.

Soon there will be only wind and waves,

Trees talking among themselves, a chuchotement,

I there as dust, and if I do not reach

The outer shell of the world, still I may

Enter into the substance of a leaf.”

 

Chuchotement: French for “whisper.”

'An Unknown, Powerful, and Awful Truth'

“It is extraordinary how jargon intimidates; how prone we are to dismiss as irrelevant or dated that which comes unpackaged in the cellophane of current phraseology and images, and has nevertheless to represent those of a totally different era.” 

Another symptom of “presentism”: unwillingness to acquire at least a working knowledge of a new language by a writer from the past. “Acquire” is misleading. It’s not like learning Russian as an adult. “Adapt to” or “become comfortable with” are closer. A lazy reader will object to anything he is unable to instantaneously comprehend. More than fifty years ago one of my English professors complained that most of her students were unable to read anything written before Hemingway’s arrival. This came in the context of reading Tristram Shandy, which several classmates were complaining about.

 

The passage quoted above was written by the American poet Josephine Jacobsen (1908-2003) in "The Masks of Walter de la Mare," published in the Fall 1978 issue of The Sewanee Review. I take her observation personally because for many years I ignored the work of de la Mare in poetry and prose largely because of the language and his interest in the mutedly uncanny. His sentences often seemed fey, fuzzy and whimsical. After all, he wrote for kids, didn’t he? I wanted hard, flinty language. Jacobsen concentrates on de la Mare’s stories, which I now acknowledge as among my favorites:

 

“What is De la Mare's primary -- and forever relevant -- premise?” she asks. “It is the premise of strangeness, and of its creature, the stranger. That stranger is the one who is suddenly caught peering at us as we pass in a dim room before an unexpected mirror.”

 

De la Mare treats strangeness realistically. That’s not a gratuitously cute paradox. His world is strange and his people are sensitive to it. It’s not like the gorefests in contemporary horror movies. I don't ever recall encountering overt violence in a de la Mare story. It’s a matter of atmosphere, of quietly puzzling, barely perceived events. Often the main character is more confused than frightened. His stories seldom feel like genre-based slumming. Jacobsen articulates this quality:

 

“De la Mare has essayed the difficult task of catching that strangeness, of examining it in its effects, of relating it to what we know and what we do not. He has done it in ghost stories (if something as ambiguous as the ghostly element in these tales can be so crudely classified); by a lovely and acid sort of fairy tale; but more often and more characteristically by his stories of those who dwell on the edge--that line which divides (or does not) reality and appearance, life and death, which he has taken for his precarious foothold.”

 

De la Mare’s language delicately delineates events our rational minds ignore or safely categorize as “odd” and then forget. Jacobsen writes:

 

“It is the truly vital, the greatly endowed with life, who are most acutely aware of death, as witness the graves, plumes, hearses, and skulls of the Elizabethans; and the bland timidity of the dreadful vocabulary tailored for Our Senior Citizens, with its Rest Homes, Golden Age Clubs, Loved Ones, and Memorial Parks. De la Mare's world -- far from being that of the sugar-spun pixies with which his nonreaders often tend to associate him [that was me] -- is one of a grim and terrifying beauty, mined by abysses, peopled with the sleepwalkers of a trustful materialism, the constant borderline of the assaults of an unknown, powerful, and awful truth.”

 

[See the late Jane Greer’s 2023 essay “‘A poet, dangerous and steep’: reintroducing Josephine Jacobsen.”]

'I Love the Universe Because It’s Made of Stories'

The third issue of New Verse Review has just been published, and I take it all back: poetry is not dead. The journal is crowded with work by good poets familiar – Jane Greer, Jared Carter, Ernest Hilbert, Amit Majmudar, Alfred Nicol – and previously unknown, like Daniel Patrick Sheehan. Good to see two Aaron Poochigian poems, including “Not Atoms”: 

“When, strolling through the Village, I discover

“one lonesome shoe, a jeweled but dogless collar,

the crushed rose of a hitman or a lover,

barf like an offering, a half-burnt dollar,

'Scream' masks holding traffic-light-top vigil,

 loose lab rats among the morning glories

 or Elmo trapped inside a witch’s sigil,

 

“I love the universe because it’s made of stories.”

I’m reminded of another "list" or catalog poem, a sonnet by Jorge Luis Borges, “Things,” (Selected Poems, 2000) translated by Stephen Kessler:

 

“My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,

The obedient lock, the belated notes

The few days left to me will not find time

To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,

A book and crushed in its pages the withered

Violet, monument to an afternoon

Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,

The mirror in the west where a red sunrise

Blazes its illusion. How many things,

Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,

Serve us like slaves who never say a word,

Blind and so mysteriously reserved.

They will endure beyond our vanishing;

And they will never know that we have gone.”

 

Poochigian and Borges remind us of the world’s bounty, including good poems. The founding editor of New Verse Review, Steve Knepper, keeps all three issues available and free.