Friday Links
July 25, 2025
Jane Greer, aka North Dakota Jane
Jane Greer: RIP
Denise Trull on Jane Greer
Anecdotal Evidence on Jane Greer
Dr. Bilo’s Celebrated Magazine: In Memory of Jane Greer
Poems by Jane Greer
Love Like a Conflagration—Jane Greer on Catholic Culture Podcast
Jane Greer: RIP
I had other links prepared for today, but the wonderful poet and critic Jane Greer, North Dakota Jane, passed away on July 22 with her husband by her side and I’d like to honor her. Jane was a charming and fun-loving person with a mischievous sense of humor. This may sound like a small thing, but it wasn’t, and isn’t. Charm and humor are totally underrated qualities in our society today. Her funny social media posts always made me burst out in laughter—a blessing in any setting, but especially on social media, which, yes, can be toxic. But if social media can be venomous then Jane was an antidote to its poisons with her good humor and grace. That is: she used social media honestly, for the good—good poetry, good fun, good friendships.
Jane gave evidence that how you use something matters. She wasn’t merely a jokester who also happened to share her poetry. She brought her full self to Facebook and Twitter, her beliefs, her orneriness (erasures poems, anyone), her kindness, and levity. The outpouring of prayers and good wishes, the shock at her death and the sharing of her poems (and jokes) shows that Jane made a lot of friends on social media, which supposedly was the point of those apps in the first place, at least for those of us who use them, if not for the companies themselves.
Jane was one of the founders of the New Formalists with her Plains Poetry Journal (or according to Wikipedia, part of the New Formalism’s advance guard, which must have cracked Jane up—did she use metaphors to slash and slice through free verse? Did she dig into meter and rhyme? Or use killer images to slay the opponent? Did she drop bombs in an effort to wipe out erasure poems?). An excellent poet herself, formidable might be a better word, her original work was published throughout the 1980-90’s until she “lost” the ability to write verse for almost 30 years. She spent those years teaching and working as a civil servant in North Dakota, then, to Jane’s delight and ours, poetry came back to her around 2019.
In 2020, her second collection, Love Like a Conflagration, was publsihed, followed by her third, The World as We Know It Is Falling Away, in 2024, both from Lambing Press. Her work has appeared in major journals, including one of my favorite Jane Greer poems, “Micha-el,” in Modern Age. She was also an excellent critic, and made it her mission to bring Josephine Jacobsen’s work to the world. I asked her once to blurb Memory’s Abacus by Anna Lewis and she asked for the weekend to consider the request. Her gracious yes came with a note that the blurb was shorter than I’d requested, but it was the kind of blurb that Jane herself “would love to receive.” I believe there might be a commandment about behaving in just this way. She was, as the kids say (or used to, I can’t keep up) fierce, her poetry slayed, and she was a sweetheart, gracious and encouraging to new and old poets alike. A fire emoji from Jane meant your poem was a hit. She, and her poetry, will be missed. Our prayers go out to her husband, Jim, and her family, as we pray for the repose of her soul. May her memory be eternal.
Jane’s two books are available here.
Denise Trull on Jane Greer
And there she was every day making me laugh out loud with her observations on life up there in North Dakota, and serving up the choicest of memes for my cackling pleasure. I started really loving her, though I knew nothing at all about her inner fires! She was old like me, and supremely jolly in a wittily wicked sort of way, and I looked forward to seeing her each day on facebook.
Anecdotal Evidence on Jane Greer
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.
Dr. Bilo’s Celebrated Magazine: In Memory of Jane Greer
We console ourselves for the loss by reminding ourselves that Jane’s poetry was only a small part of her work. She was a sower, and we are still reaping the harvest from the dozens of good poets she encouraged. She even encouraged your humble servant here, which shows us that charity was not the least of her virtues.
Poems from Jane Greer
In the link above, you’ll find Jane’s poem, “In none of her other ages,” which appeared in New Verse Review. “Motherhood on the One Quiet Night” and “Wreck and Restore Me” appeared in Plough. And this one, “Packed Carefully Away,” appears in the current issue of Nimrod International Journal. Several of her poems have appeared in First Things. Jane’s criticism and poetry have also been featured in Literary Matters over the years.
Love Like a Conflagration—Jane Greer on Catholic Culture Podcast
From 1981 to 1993, Jane Greer edited Plains Poetry Journal, publishing poets who were reviving the traditional tools of “rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance, painstaking attention to diction” which had been abandoned in favor of free verse. (These poets included names you will be familiar with from the Catholic scene today, such as Anthony Esolen and Mike Aquilina.) Then, as they say, life happened, and Greer didn’t write a single poem for almost thirty years.
But God’s ways are unpredictable. After three decades of silence, Greer was suddenly struck with a poem while sitting in a New Orleans café. This began a steady stream of output resulting in her new collection, Love Like a Conflagration (which also includes the poems from her only previous book).
Greer’s poetry is musical, fiery and accessible, and has received high praise from many of today’s foremost Catholic poets, including past podcast guests Samuel Hazo, James Matthew Wilson, Anthony Esolen and Mike Aquilina. Hazo writes: “There is not a poem in this remarkable book that will leave you unchanged or be forgotten … Each of these poems is as permanently current as it is consummate. [Greer] puts on the page the passion long absent from American poetry. I’ve never read a book as poetically and beautifully frank as this.”
