Today’s Poem: The Last Warm Saturday

Remembering Jane Greer

Alfred Bierstadt, The Plains Near Fort Laramie, c. 1863 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Last Warm Saturday

by Jane Greer

The last warm Saturday, the final mowing — 
that drone, that fragrance — with the traitor sun 
low-angled, making all this not quite right. 
Here is a bitter yearly winnowing 
of what’s to come from what is in decline, 
parsed in the language of the changing light. 

I know this language but I cannot speak it. 
I learned it from my senses, over time. 
It warms me and it makes me cold and mute. 
In trying to express its deepest secret, 
all I can mumble is its paradigm: 
that loss and bliss come from the same root. 
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The death last week of my friend Jane Greer (b. 1953), poet, critic, and founder of the formalist Plains Poetry Journal, has saddened me as it has everyone else who knew her. Her death came as a shock, at least to those of us (and there are many of us) whose relationships with her were conducted, after the old epistolary manner, primarily at a distance, online. A shock, because although she had announced that she was ill, and clearly the illness was serious, it was hard to imagine that anything could be that serious.

Or to put it another way, it was hard to imagine that anything could be serious enough to get the better of Jane. She had survived cancer and, more recently, had made a full recovery after breaking her femur, in an incident that she refused to describe except as stupid. That she might not emerge victorious from this latest fray was unthinkable.

Jane had only recently returned to the writing of verse in 2018, after a hiatus of some decades; like the English folk singer Shirley Collins, she seemed to have lost her voice, only to find it again, miraculously, in later life. Her obituary describes her being struck suddenly, on a vacation to New Orleans, with not only what Coleridge called the poet’s “appetancy” — that pregnant feeling of being about to write something — but with the actual language of new poems, the gift that had eluded her for so long.

But until the mid-1990s, she had been a force in formalist poetry. For twelve years, from 1981–1993, she had edited the Plains Poetry Journal, dedicated to traditional poetic forms, and had published much of her own work in other journals during the same period. A first limited-edition book of poems, Bathsheba on the Third Day, appeared in 1986.

In an “Editorial Manifesto” for Plains Poetry Journal, Jane had written that

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?

This was a shot across the bow at the state of poetry in America in the early 1980s, whose predominant mode Jane described as “random thoughts randomly written” (see also Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell’s The Reaper Essays for critique of the same poetic era).

Jane carried these artistic convictions, and the courage of them, into the age of social media, where she rather delighted in asking the entirety of cyberspace how an “erasure poem” could be called a poem and not an act of vandalism, or when it had become “commonplace to call a 14-line poem with no other sonnet attributes a sonnet? Asking for multitudes.” To a mutual friend she once remarked that he might as well call a poem under discussion “a zebra or a toll booth” as a sonnet. “My definition of ‘sonnet’ isn’t personal,” she said. “I didn’t dream it up.” Of course, to be a formalist was not necessarily to love all traditional forms:

The Triolet is Such a Bore

The triolet is such a bore:
five lines pretending to be eight.
Line one repeats to make line four —
the triolet is such a bore! —
and then line seven. Wait, there’s more:
line two will also duplicate.
The triolet is such a bore:
five lines pretending to be eight.

But to be a formalist, in Jane’s view, did entail that she insist that “names . . . mean something.” Jane was a believer in the existence of objective truth, not simply “my truth.” A sonnet, or any other poetic form, should honor and acknowledge the historic conventions that differentiate it from everything else, or else not claim to be what it isn’t. “That’s all I want,” she said.

Jane Greer

Jane’s first traditionally published book of poems, Love Like a Conflagration (which includes the poems from her earlier collection), was published in 2020, the same year as my own first book, Motherland — just in time for the pandemic to close everything down. We had thought that finally we were going places, and suddenly we were going nowhere at all. With our friend Marly Youmans, whose novel Charis in the World of Wonders also appeared that strange spring, we organized what seemed to us at the time a marvelous and revolutionary thing: a poetry and fiction reading on Zoom.

We called it a “Reading in the Air,” which five years on seems as quaint as one of Marianne Moore’s proposed names for a Ford car. On the day, Jane was the ill-fated person who read first: ill-fated, because I was the person who was supposed to hit the “record” button and somehow managed not to, for some minutes into her reading. Anyone but Jane would have been furious, and rightly so. I can still lie awake at night sweating over those minutes lost, wishing I could relive them as a marginally more competent person.

But if I had to choose one impression of Jane to carry with me to the end of my days, it’s the impression of her as someone genuinely surprised by recognition. On the publication of her second book, The World as We Know It Is Falling Away, in 2022, her publisher arranged a reading and speaking tour for her, encompassing several states, with a schedule made more grueling by the fact that she had only recently recovered from breaking her femur. Far from complaining about the pace, Jane received the whole experience as a privilege, a miraculous honor that had somehow, mysteriously, bestowed itself on her, through no merit of her own.

Our paths crossed in Pittsburgh during the course of that tour. When I met up with Jane over a weekend, she was clearly tired — among other things, a fire alarm had gone off in the middle of the night in her hotel, and she had had to walk down nine flights of steps, on her newly healed femur, to stand around outside for an hour or so — but what she radiated was a kind of marveling: Who am I, that the readers of poetry should come to me? To her, this attention came as pure grace.

It’s been almost three years since I spent that weekend with her. And until last Tuesday, I never once thought that there would not someday be more time. Our visit with each other was all too brief, but then — I’m compelled to reflect — isn’t it all too brief? As Jane’s most recent poems suggest, this very awareness was impressing itself on her with an urgency that now seems prescient.

But the same awareness is present, really, in all her work and showcased in her two books: the sense that whatever is beautiful in this world is made more vivid in its beauty by our apprehension of its brevity. In her vision, eternity is the most real thing. But in the limited reality of our time-bound world, day gives way to night. Our temporal joys are framed by griefs.

Today’s Poem, from Jane’s second collection, takes up that theme. It might seem precipitous to think already of the end of summer, when in so many places the summer is still blazing away, the heat laughing at our hope that it will break. But Jane made her home in North Dakota. The closer you live to the Arctic Circle, the more fleeting your summer days become. When Robert Frost wrote “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” he was thinking of the first barely green spring leaves. But here, the glory of a late-summer day on the plains proclaims its own transience, “parsed in the language of the changing light.”

The two sestets gesture at the sonnet form but — as Jane herself, adamant that words had meanings, would insist — stops short of being actually a sonnet. A sonnet’s volta does occur over the stanza break, in the turn from observation of the strange late-summer light to meditation on the speaker’s human incapacity for grasping the deeper things that that light and warmth presage. And it is a metrical poem, in iambic pentameter, with a strict rhyme scheme, both sonnet criteria that Jane rated as actually more important than having fourteen lines.

Still, there’s a balance in this poem, I think, that a true sonnet would cede to its own pattern of problem and solution: the heavier octave, the briefer sestet. Here, the pattern is more like problem/problem, juxtaposing the paradox of winter perceived in the midst of summer with the paradox of “loss and bliss” as springing from the same “root,” both the word itself and some deeper, more mysterious source.

The poem doesn’t resolve that sense of mystery. Whatever resolution there is for these paradoxes lies beyond the poem’s own boundaries. The speaker stops at the threshold of mystery, to acknowledge the existence of a reality she can’t more fully articulate. Meanwhile, the rhyme scheme, abcabc in both stanzas, signals the cyclical nature of the seasons. Time’s patterns repeat themselves, even as the patterns of this poem do. But as the last line orders things, it’s bliss that succeeds loss. Grief exists in the turn of the world, but joy does not abandon us.

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