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Jane Greer (born May 25, 1953) 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, publishing the work of such noted poets as Frederick Turner, Anthony M. Esolen, and Judson Jerome. 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.

Her 1986 book, Bathsheba on the Third Day, was hand-printed by printer Harry Duncan at The Cummington Press. Greer has taught writing at Bismarck State College. For two decades she worked as a civil servant for the State of North Dakota.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jane Greer", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0