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.
