An Interview with Jynne Dilling Martin

Justin Bigos: I have just had the pleasure of reading the manuscript of your first book, We Mammals in Hospitable Times. The book does indeed seem to take on the larger animal experience on the planet Earth, and the voice you’ve given us is like the coolest anthropologist ever – brainy, fierce, sexual, and brimming with devilishly detailed observations and insights. Big question: what is it about poetry that provides the ideal space/form for this big mammalian brain activity?

Jynne Martin: I recently saw a portrait of the first zebra to ever arrive in England – George Stubbs painted it in 1763, and the zebra looks so confused, out of place, alone, yet watchful and curious – something burns in those big black dilated zebra eyes. This is often how I feel as I move bodily through the world – this life is so strange to me, holds so much beauty and so much sadness, and I don’t feel I am quite wired to belong here.

Something in the compactness and abruptness and weirdness possible in poetry feels like the right way to say this back to the planet. But I resonate with people saying this in any form, whether it’s Hieronymus Bosch or Chris Marker or the Log Lady from Twin Peaks.

JB: Readers will enjoy – and have enjoyed, in many magazines – your wit and humor. I laughed out loud a few times reading this book (which is rare for someone raised in Connecticut). In your poem “Beauty in Its Various Forms Appeals to You,” you describe the attempt to communicate with the “scowling stag beetle” and how even after developing a “common idiom of clicks,” “it could be months of small talk/ about hedgerows and larvae before sufficient trust was established.” The image is hilarious in part because of the tiny communication machinery you describe, but also because the poem ends so poignantly: “Clock click pause clack pause click: beloved things have been lost.” Do you find yourself drawn to a particular kind of humor? Are there certain poets you find very funny?

JM: Now you’re just trying to flatter a few bottles of Old Crow out of me – I wish I were much funnier than I am on the page. It’s so hard to be funny in poetry – we all put on our serious glasses when we sit to write or read it. IMPORTANT WORD ARRANGEMENTS HAPPENING PEOPLE FOCUS!

My favorite humor is simultaneously hysterically funny and deathly true. It exists on every page of Lydia Davis, in fragments of Stephen Crane’s Black Riders, occasional John Ashbery (especially my favorite collection Can You Hear, Bird?) and in the bodily form of Werner Herzog.



JB: Interesting that you say “occasional” Ashbery. It seems like a lot of people only like a part of him, maybe a book or two. What I like about that position is that it privileges the work over the author, over the oeuvre—which often seems to get too much attention in book reviews. I remember Elizabeth Strout at last year’s AWP conference was asked who her favorite writers were. She said, basically, “I don’t know. I remember the books. I don’t really think too much about the authors.” I found that so refreshing and honest.

JM: Liz Strout is refreshingly honest on all subjects, including her secret love of orange Hostess snack cakes. We should have a separate interview where we fly to Maine then just quote her back and forth.

JB: It’s a deal. I’d like to talk a bit about your titles. They often sound “found”: from fortune cookies, or news headlines, pulp novel chapters, even think tank reports. Did you make most of these up? Do you keep an eye out for titles, even for poems you’ve yet to write?

JM: I love titles, and that’s where almost every poem I write begins. I am shameless, gluttonous, and catholic in all the places I steal from, and my notebooks are filled with dozens of potential titles or parts of titles that I scrawl in ALL CAPS to trigger my brain. Flipping through my current notebook, some I know the source - THOSE WHO SPEAK HAVE NO SECRETS is Beckett; THE DECEASED WILL BE FOUND RIGHTEOUS AFTER HIS HEART IS WEIGHED is from the Egyptian wing of the Met; A FOOLISH ARGUMENT TO REASSURE THE CITIZENS is modified Demosthenes. Other scribbles I can’t account for, e.g. recently IN NIGHT WE ARE TWO PEOPLE and THE SAFEST WAY TO DIE; probably those were summaries of dreams I had, which is another primary title source for me.

JB: That is very cool that you write your titles before your poems, and you write them in CAPS. I may try that. You should meet a fellow here at the University of North Texas by the name of Zach VandeZande. He’s a big fan of CAPS LOCK.

JM: ZACH WILL YOU MARRY ME

JB: I wonder if you’d talk a bit about your experiences in trying to get this book published. I know you’ve been sending it out for a few years now, and even though you’ve gotten close – including being a recent finalist for the National Poetry Series – no one has taken the book. I imagine getting so close is both exciting and frustrating. Can you tell us what this experience has taught you? Do you have any advice for poets sending out their first book manuscripts?

JM: CAPS IS HOW I FEEL INSIDE ALL THE TIME JUSTIN but especially when you ask this question. The manuscript has been a finalist ten times in top contests over the past few years, 98% of the poems have been published individually in wonderful journals like Granta and New England Review, but no actual book yet. Year after year I keep holding out for one of my dream publishers or prizes to come through, which isn’t the fastest road to a book. Jeff Shotts of Graywolf did give it a very generous read about three years ago, which I deeply appreciate, as I think every book he publishes is so thoughtfully and beautifully done. Meantime I just keep writing new poems at my snail pace and pulling the weakest pages out, putting new better ones in, so the manuscript morphs into a new creature year by year.

I will add that one most useful thing I did was attend the Colrain Manuscript Conference run by the tremendous poet Joan Houlihan - you receive actual book-length manuscript feedback, which is very different than individual poem feedback.

JB: I know you are a big fan of Werner Herzog, and maybe because of this – and maybe because so many of the poems share his zoom-lens sense of the world in all its terror and splendor – I heard his voice reading certain lines of these poems. So: what are the chances we can get an audio version of your book with Mr. Herzog reading them?

JM: That is the single highest compliment I can imagine. As for having the chance to hear Werner read even one of my poems aloud, I can only wish my life may unfurl so richly that it may someday be so. For that matter I will accept collect calls from anyone who wants to phone in a bad impersonation.

JB: For the 40th Anniversary issue (Fall 2011) of Ploughshares, Ellen Bryant Voigt introduced your poem “Dropped Things Are Bound to Sink.” It’s one of my favorite poems in the book, and Ellen beautifully observes that your poetry uses “music simultaneously as a principle for order and for wildness.” I imagine you are a crazy reviser, and I wonder if it just this “music” – above (or pulsing underneath) – any other conscious concern that guides you.

JM: It was a great honor to have Ellen Bryant Voigt write that essay, and I can only hope my best poems aspire to her description. And if by “crazy” you mean neurotic, then yes absolutely. Completely crazy. I am especially neurotic about trying not to over-explain an associative thread, trying not to hedge on the weirder moments – I prefer poems to dwell in a mysterious grey robe. To quote my beloved Log Lady, “There is a depression after an answer is given.”

JB: It’s so weird you’ve twice mentioned the Log Lady: I just started my yearly Twin Peaks marathon, and it still baffles me that each episode gives viewers two options: 1. Play with Log Lady Intro and 2. Play without Log Lady Intro. What heathens would skip the Log Lady Intro? As Stephin Merritt would say, “Bad things will happen to them.”

JM: And why isn’t “Play only Log Lady Intros” an option? We need a yearly party where we sit silently in full lotus and watch her intros on a loop all day long. Zach can come and live-blog the event in ALL CAPS.

JB: Thanks so much, Jynne. I know the book will get picked up soon, and the world will be better for it. Good luck.

JM: THANK YOU JUSTIN


CASE IN POINT: BOLOGNA

Microwave bologna:
it swells into a shiny pink hill.
Most things would just die.

© Jynne Dilling Martin 2011.


Jynne Dilling Martin’s poetry has appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, New England Review, Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, TriQuarterly, Southern Review, and has been featured on the PBS “Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” She is a Yaddo fellow, and winner of the 2009 Boston Review/92nd Street Y Discovery Prize. She was also a finalist for the 2008 Ruth Lilly Prize, and was selected for the Boston Review Poet’s Sampler by Matthea Harvey.