Jane Greer

Who is Jane Greer?

Jane Greer is an American poet. In 1981 she founded Plains Poetry Journal, a literary magazine that was an advance guard of the New Formalism movement. 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." Greer edited Plains Poetry Journal until 1993. In 1984, Writer's Digest named Plains Poetry Journal the "#1 Non-paying U.S. Poetry Magazine."

Greer's poems have 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 further elaborated in a short essay, "Art Is Made," in A Formal Feeling Comes.