The World Without Her in It
On the passing of Jane Greer, the newest New Verse Review, how death inspires poetry.
Hello, all. I’ve been meaning to write some meaningful replies to comments from my last post regarding how having a shared movie canon strengthens culture. I am so incredibly impressed by the thoughtfulness of my readers, and I guess I may have been paralyzed by overthinking. Has that ever happened to you?
Well, now two weeks have gone by and many things have happened. One of the things I have not officially announced in my twice-a-month-ish newsletter is that I’ve been promoted to Deputy Editor of New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry, of which I was previously a Contributing Editor.1 What this means is that, although I had no part in putting the latest issue together, I got updates and previews as Steve Knepper, Mary Grace Mangano, and D.A. Cooper assembled New Verse Review 2.3: Summer 2025. (Click here for a downloadable copy. It’s very good!)
I had been looking forward to the release on July 23, ready to share the launch with everyone. However, I woke up on Wednesday to the news that the great poet Jane Greer had passed away the previous evening at the age of 72. Jane was a formalist firebrand, a stalwart defender of metrically regular verse. She had definite opinions about what poetry was — and what it wasn’t. Although I sometimes found myself on the *wrong* side of things with Jane (and I can’t say she was gentle in trying to correct me), it didn’t really affect my feelings toward her. I knew she had a good heart and a great love for language. In fact, it was because she cared so much that she argued with such great fervor. No matter what our disagreements were like, I thought she was funny and faithful. I followed her online and attended her online readings just so I could sit in my little video box with copies of her books on my lap, ready to lift their covers up for the camera and paste links in the chat to encourage more people to buy her books.
I adored Jane. I am sorry she is gone, and I miss her already. It is such privilege to be on the masthead of a journal that published this poem of hers, which appeared in the Winter 2025 edition of NVR:
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.
I can’t help but feel struck by the timeliness of this poem and “Packed Carefully Away” which appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Nimrod International Journal, another excellent literary publication, edited by Boris Dralyuk and his team at University of Tulsa.
Given Jane’s formalist bent, I believe she would have loved NVR’s summer issue which I think is one of the most exciting mixes of theme, scope and craft I have seen in a poetry journal. Given my last reading of this issue after the news of Jane’s death, I was struck by how many poems were written in the memory of other people. When a famous personality dies, it often inspires poets like Carla Sarett who wrote “Don’t Worry Baby” for the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. However, the most moving poems are the ones written on a more intimate level, like James Matthew Wilson’s heartbreaking “Last Words for Jason” addressed to his brother who passed away earlier this year:
That I did not foresee it, when I set
Your name and life within my poems—that I
Had done what those who plant a landmine do—
Is no surprise.
David Rothman’s four sonnets from the sequence "Keep the Harp" in Orpheus Looks Back are dedicated to his wife, Emily Desire Gaynor Rothman.
From “Erect No Monument“:
If you loved Em, then you’ll sing what she loved
Because she loved it. Sing about yóur bride.
Victoria Moul’s poem has her dedication in the title, “I.m. Andrew, October 2024”, for her friend Andrew Hurley:
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.
My own poem, “The Gamblers” was written in the memory of Eric Liwanag, a childhood friend who passed away just in the first weeks of starting my MFA at the University of St. Thomas in Houston.2 In fact, a number of my poems written during James Matthew Wilson’s Craft of Poetry class were inspired by Eric’s sudden passing. My particular poem starts with a memory of us but then speaks more about the passing of a generation and the sacrifices they made for our success.
And then there is the poem by Midge Goldberg, “To the Young Woman in the Restroom at the Wedding” which I found enriched for having read an article that she wrote in Plough, “What Do You Say to a Grieving Friend?“ Her essay is about her daughter’s partner, a young man who died in his sleep, the ensuing grief, and the importance of the mourning process and comforting the living. Midge’s poem explores the awkwardness of what people assume and the reality of what someone may actually be feeling:
My daughter and her beau would not have wed
Anyway. She talked of serious doubt—
They weren’t “a perfect match,” as these vows said.O bathroom confidante, please know I cried
That wedding day for a lovely man who died.
Death is a strange Muse, but it’s one that visits the Poet more and more the older one gets. Everyone will die. It’s a catastrophic sentence but a true one. We want to remember the ones we love as long as we can, and writing helps us cross that river of grief and memory. However, the other blessing of poetry is that those we love can live on in our art. And the poets themselves who have passed into the shadowlands play their own Orphean music that we can follow, finding them ever so briefly. And in a glance — they’re gone again.
Please do yourselves a favor and read Jane Greer’s poetry. She was a treasure. I highly recommend her two collections available from Lambing Press, Love Like a Conflagration and The World as We Know It Is Falling Away.
“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.”
I don’t know if anyone would be interested in hearing how one goes from being an erstwhile poet to contributing editor to deputy editor of a pretty journal, but I could write about it. It still baffles me to a certain extent. The only advice I have is do what you love and something may happen.
This is the first post where I posted about Eric’s death:
Thanks for mentioning my poem Zina!
My condolences on the death of your friend. And congratulations on your new position at NVR. I just sent the PDF to Kindle. I’m drowning in poetry to read right now!