I WILL NOT WRITE / WRITE I WILL / MY WILL, Jane Lewty

Summer 2026

Jane Gregory’s most recent poetry collection, WORKING TITLE (Three Count Pour: Chicago, 2025, pp. 30) uses the title ‘Book I Will Not Write’ for several of its poems. The book enacts a motion of drafting, revision, rejection, resistance, and a negotiation with the act of writing. Though displaying anxiety about the inchoate nature of production, the poems are nevertheless precise and meticulously-constructed, with Gregory’s customary attention to line and voice. WORKING TITLE offers an entry point into a discussion of poetry that enacts its own making – and its brokenness. How do we “make art” according to one’s own needs and desires if those motivations are shifting and non-specific in themselves? What happens when the page itself becomes a region of tension rather than solace? What is the difference between embarking upon a project that must eventually be ‘a book’ and one that cannot be construed as (or in) a recognizable form? Why must we impose such prescriptive fantasies on the poem? Of course, these questions are not new in themselves, but they remind us of the opportunity to interrogate poetry that refuses the finality of product and, instead, demonstrates its own process, one that cannot necessarily be concluded.