Jane Rohrer (b. 1928) grew up on a poultry and horse farm located in the Shenandoah Valley and attended Eastern Mennonite College in nearby Harrisonburg, Virginia. In 1948, she married fellow student Warren Rohrer. Throughout their long marriage, Jane supported her husband’s artistic career and performed the roles of wife and mother to their two sons.
From the 1970s on, she also engaged seriously with poetry, studying independently, auditing university courses, and taking part in writers’ workshops. For nearly three decades, her work appeared periodically in The American Poetry Review. In 2002, her first collection of poems, Life After Death, was published. A second collection, Acquiring Land: Late Poems, was published in early 2020.
Warren Rohrer (1927–1995) was born in Smoketown, a small village in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Raised in a conservative Mennonite family, he earned bachelor’s degrees in Bible Studies at Eastern Mennonite College and in art education at Madison College (now James Madison University).
While working as a high school teacher, Warren enrolled in summer courses in the master’s program in art education at Penn State in 1952, returning between 1953 and 1955 as a student of painter Hobson Pittman. Warren became an influential art teacher and for twenty-five years was on the faculty of the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts). For more on Warren’s time at Penn State, click here.
Between 1961 and 1984, Jane maintained the family home and extensive gardens on their farm in Christiana, Pennsylvania, where Warren painted in a barn studio. From 1984, they lived at Lower Cogslea, the former studio and residence of muralist Violet Oakley in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. Warren regularly returned to sketch and photograph in rural Lancaster County until his death in 1995. Jane continues to live with her family in her Mount Airy home.
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Place
The words dappled with sunlight
floated across the open field
as I drove by.
You understand the dapples
did not float
or the sunlight
just the words
since by that time
I had passed
and would never see
that green instant again.
Yet it is cut in permanence and
perfect
in my most real of archives
a small gallery
of moving frames
from another place
while I am here.
Listen to this poem:
Read by Jane Rohrer.
Then, (realizing I had not swung in the hammock
all summer,
that it was rotten from holding rain,
and seeing him mow upside down around the egg-
plant-color pond until he moved
to this side where I could not see him
until he came back up the hill in the green
avenue he had made, to the woodchop pile
of trees felled on the hillside
and, oh, yes, the alfalfa’s been cut again
and raked into windrows
with the odor of curling still in the air
from the last crop that lately lay in swaths,)
Is all a day-lily knows.
Listen to this poem:
Read by Julia Spicher Kasdorf.
Leaving Venice
I am the one on the back deck of the ship leaving the canal
The one crying at the opera aria and near to going overboard
In the music of the wake churning up.
Of what I saw and what I heard I can say little
Or reach back for what I mourn, to take it with me.
If I had stayed, and we never can,
I would have met them all
There would have been teacups and goblets as in the old days
And eventually I would have danced in a long swag of skirt
And Venice would have been as it is in the books
Written by English women.
Attachment would have fastened me to those stone steps
I bought and would lose.
How contradictory of me. I was hardly there
Certainly not long enough to leave.
Take my advice:
If you go for more than a minute
You will die for its decaying perfection when you leave
You will play the films over and over
And do things intensely
As though for the last time.
You will come to sound like a lonely cello.
But then I am not talking about Venice.
Listen to this poem:
Read by Janie Rohrer, Jane’s granddaughter.
Valentine
I will make you a valentine of snow;
you can let it melt
and dip your fingers in
to know how a rivulet felt.
Or lift it to your lips
to slake a thirst–
if you remember sips
and thirst and lips.
Where you have gone, or go
I will send you a valentine of snow
in case you do not touch snow, now.
Listen to this poem:
Read by Janie Rohrer, Jane’s granddaughter.
Story
Don’t think the story moves before us
like a single file of horses
passing along a horizon line in the eye.
Don’t think there is a story at all
rather a great congress of scenes
on a stage revolving once in twenty-four hours.
It’s theater in the round
and we are the audience
which is, of course, on stage also.
In a rare instant
when we are not performing
we see through the curtain
the act that just passed
in its slow merry-go-round motion
to the sound of calliope
and recognize ourselves
as we are, everywhere at once.
Listen to this poem:
Read by Jane Rohrer.
