The people who filled the pews for her funeral were surprised to hear she was a nationally renowned poet.
Her neighbors in Bismarck, North Dakota, knew Jane Greer as the woman who answered the phones at the convent.
Some knew her as the lady who visited their prison to teach them about Jesus.
For many homeless people, she was the lady who helped them write a résumé and prepare for job interviews.
Others knew her simply as the wife of Jim and the mother of Robert.
As word of her death spread across the country, however, media both old and new lit up with tributes to the poet. “You may not know her name,” said Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review, “but some considered Greer the greatest living American poet.” New Verse Review announced it was preparing a special issue in her honor.
The market for poetry in the United States is relatively small, and the community of poets is tiny, but Jane Greer earned both an audience and the respect of her peers. On Poetry Twitter, she held court as NorthDakotaJane, and her judgments — blunt, plainspoken, and often hilarious — won likes, shares, and followers by the thousands.
But tweets are transient. Jane’s legacy is in the craft of her poems — and the craftsmanship she encouraged in other poets.
Jane was born into a Presbyterian family in Iowa in 1953 and moved to South Dakota in her last year of high school. She began studies at South Dakota State University but dropped out early, finishing her degree some years later at Mary College (now the University of Mary) in Bismarck.
In her teens, she was already writing poems in traditional forms, and in her 20s she was publishing them. Before turning 30, she had founded a magazine, Plains Poetry Journal (PPJ), which she edited from 1981 to 1993. The title was carefully chosen. She published the work of poets from all over the world, but she gave pride of place to what she called “the Heartland” — the middle of the continent often ignored by coastal elites.
So she began with Plains, and she proceeded to Poetry, a word that for Jane came with a definition, a discernible craft, and a rich tradition that should not be ignored.
In the editorial for the very first issue, she wrote that PPJ “was a magazine for traditional poetry; that is, for poetry that uses the best from the past. Through history, the best poetry has used certain conventions: meter, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and painstaking attention to diction, among others. Not all good poems use all of these conventions, but if a poem uses none of them, why call it a poem?” Her credo, she said, was simple: “No subject matter is taboo; treatment is everything.”
At the time, “free verse” was dominant in U.S. literary circles. Jane’s words were intentionally provocative.
Her “little magazine” had an outsized influence. In retrospect, it was (in the words of Jane’s Wikipedia article) “an advance guard of the New Formalism movement” in American poetry.
Her own first book, “Bathsheba on the Third Day” (Cummington Press, $75), appeared in 1986 to the praise of reviewers. One critic noted the “perfection” of her poems and the “novelty of approaches Greer uses to handle the oldest of themes.” “More impressive even than the traditional craft,” he went on to say, is “the raw fact” of a particular poem “having been imagined.”
In the same period, on a tour of Great Britain, she met the man she would marry: Jim Luptak, who held a master’s degree in literature and shared Jane’s passion for books.
Her spiritual explorations, meanwhile, led her to enter full communion with the Catholic Church.
She was editing a prestigious journal. She was writing her own poems. Then Chronicles, a magazine of cultural critique, hired her as a monthly columnist. In so many ways, she told friends, she felt she had arrived.
When she and Jim adopted their son, Robert, however, she made the decision to sacrifice it all. She shuttered the magazine, stopped the column, and rejected every inclination to write a poem. In the literary world, she went silent.
In Bismarck, though, she raised her son, worked as a civil servant, and quietly did good at the margins of the community, among the homeless and in prisons.
Eventually, she became a lay member of the Benedictines, an Oblate, who helped out with small jobs at the local monastery. She survived a serious bout of cancer. She began to write reviews and essays for the Catholic press, including Angelus News.
Then, just as suddenly as her poetry had stopped, it started anew, after 20 years of silence. In 2019, Jane and Jim were vacationing in New Orleans, sitting in a café, when a poem came to her, and she scribbled it down. By the hotel pool, she sensed another taking shape.
Afterward they flowed fairly steadily till the end of her life. In 2020, she published her second collection, “Love like a Conflagration” (Lambing Press, $14.95), which includes perhaps her most famous poem, “Micha-El,” about St. Michael the Archangel. A third collection, “The World as We Know It Is Falling Away” (Lambing Press, $16.95), appeared in 2022.
In her later poems the craft is subtler, more intricate, while the language is simpler and blazing in its clarity. Her last poems are profoundly religious, yet also sensual, seizing earthly moments before they vanish into eternity. The books are apocalyptic, as both titles suggest, but filled with hope and humor.
To promote her collections she embarked in 2022 on a multi-state tour of readings — in spite of being hobbled by a broken femur.
In two of her last published poems, “Packed Carefully Away” and “In None of Her Other Ages,” she expressed a strong and peaceful sense of the nearness of the end.
Jane’s final illness was brief, less than two weeks in which she underwent five surgeries. Near the beginning of her hospital stay, she asked for and received all that the Catholic Church had to offer.
When she died, tributes filled the World Wide Web and radio, and then spilled over into the pages of periodicals. With her husband’s help, her publisher, Lambing Press, is preparing a collection of her last poems.
In a 2019 email, she wrote: “It’s the poet’s job to (1) TRY to see this world as the face and body of a loving God and then (2) TRY to communicate that vision in words. Go big or go home, right?”
She wrote poems that were big and rich as prophecy. Now she’s gone home.
In None of Her Other Ages
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.
Packed Carefully Away
It seemed an endless season of letting go,
and what was lost, surrendered, none will guess.
The tide will always smooth the battered beach
and the charred heart of the wood burst forth in green.
And all that was given up no one will know,
nor the cost which now seems nearly a caress:
all kept in secret, forming no part of speech.
Embers will cool and sands be made pristine.
All kept in secret, saved but pressed down low,
packed carefully away with a muttered blessing.
Tide cannot alter what it cannot reach.
The charred heart of the wood remains unseen.
