Jane Rohrer, innovative poet and author, has died at 96

Jane Rohrer, 96, of Philadelphia, an innovative poet and author, died Saturday, Nov. 2, of heart failure at her home in West Mount Airy.

Mrs. Rohrer’s first book of poetry, Life After Death, was published in 2002, when she was 74, and colleagues called it “stunningly irresistible” and “original and wonderful.” For years before that, she was a muse to her husband, painter Warren Rohrer, and her poems about her life and his art were published regularly in the American Poetry Review, 1993′s Parallels: Artists/Poets, and other journals.

She used poetic expression to describe everyday objects and experiences, and was one of the first poets with a conservative Mennonite background to publish in mainstream American literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. Her second book, Acquiring Land: Late Poems, was published in 2020, and fellow poet Theodore Weiss praised her “simple direct language and subtle surreal turns of mind.”

Poet David Rivard said she wrote “wonderful stuff, really beautiful and full of feeling, without an ounce of sentimentality or manipulation.” Professor Stephen Berg, founder of the American Poetry Review, said: “Attentive readers will hear it and be moved and amazed by its simple magic.”

Writer Stephen DiLauro reviewed her work for The Inquirer in 2000 and said: “Jane Rohrer imbues her pastoral ‘Orchard in the Spring’ with a sense of awe about this mysterious love of place. Her final stanza explores the luxury and security a poet experiences in tending and loving a simple patch of earth.”

That final stanza is: “I lie down in the grass and look up/Now I am waiting/Someone I know is that dried apple/Holding on since last fall/Soon a green shoot will push it from the limb/To the ground.”

Earlier, Mrs. Rohrer suggested titles for and wrote poems about the paintings of her husband. He died in 1995, and her poems and his paintings were displayed side by side at the Woodmere Art Museum in 2022 and the Palmer Museum of Art at Pennsylvania State University in 2021.

She said her poems about his paintings were like “hearing the brush.” Woodmere director and chief executive officer William Valerio said: “Jane captured the tangible essence of the visual arts and the studio practice itself.”

Mrs. Rohrer studied with Irish poet Thomas Kinsella at Temple University and Berg at the old Philadelphia College of Art in the 1970s. Berg published her work for decades in the American Poetry Review, and professor Julia Spicher Kasdorf, director of creative writing at Penn State, edited Acquiring Land.

She traveled with her husband, brother, granddaughter, and other family members on exciting journeys to Europe and Africa. She particularly enjoyed visiting Venice, and she wrote about some of her adventures abroad in Acquiring Land.

“The narrative and lyric poems still hold up because of her insight, wit, and keen sense of craft,” Kasdorf said.

Martha Jane Turner was born Oct. 11, 1928, on a horse farm in Broadway, Va. She graduated from Eastern Mennonite School and attended what is now Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia.

She met Warren Rohrer at Eastern Mennonite, and they married in 1948, and “ganged up and ran away,” she said, to establish lives independent of their Mennonite upbringing. They had sons Jon and Dean, and lived on a small farm in Lancaster County in the 1960s and ’70s.

They tended an organic garden and hosted memorable gatherings of artists and art collectors. In 1984, they moved to the former home studio of artist Violet Oakley in West Mount Airy.

Mrs. Rohrer worked for an architectural firm when she was young and was a member of a Lancaster-based poets workshop called Countermeasure. She was modest, hardworking, and orderly, her family said.

She liked to read, visit museums and galleries, and immerse herself in the art scene. She had a stroke in 2015.

“She didn’t put on airs,” said her son Jon. “She shared herself freely. She was authentic. She always said she had words in her.”

In addition to her sons, Mrs. Rohrer is survived by three granddaughters, one great-granddaughter, a sister, a brother, and other relatives. A sister and two brothers died earlier.

A remembrance of her life is to be held later.

Donations in her name may be made to the American Poetry Review, 1906 Rittenhouse Square, 3rd Floor, Philadelphia, Pa. 19103.