Introduction to Jynne Dilling Martin

Jynne Dilling Martin completed her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where I teach, and although she was never my student, except in the occasional workshop, I’ve kept my eye on her. From the start her impressive gifts included a distinct voice— headlong, unprotected, usually jazzed, sometimes manic, often very funny, and always expressive of tremendous linguistic and imaginative energy. But here’s something new: after the voice propels us down into “Dropped Things Are Bound to Sink,” that opening complex sentence set in hard enjambment against the orderly couplets and bent to its own dense music, Martin orchestrates a change in tone with more straightforward syntax, diction, and lineation, and the first of two crucial interrogatives:

    Is this faith, how by and by, darkness begins to look like light?

Seven lines later, the placement of its echo

    Why disbelieve all those promises?

will steady the dazzling variety of syntax and stabilize the poem’s structure; and negotiating exactly between them are the poem’s shortest declaratives, conjoined by a single line:

    But the pillars of great temples stand far apart. A lost wind slithers between.

It is here that the dominant harsh consonants abate, the “bentback cricket leg,” the “wicked…paralytics” whose mouths are “packed,” the black hood and cornstalks and “unstruck” cymbals and “naked skin” giving way to liquid L’s—the deep insinuation of that verb “slithers”—before they (and a larger bentback appendage) reassert the speaker’s passionate, primitive, stubborn refusal.

    Now I sit on a rock with my back to the wreck…
    I suck the meat off a great seabird, kick sand over his crooked bones.

To use music simultaneously as a principle for order and for wildness: this is the maturity of her art, soon to be available, I am confident, in her first collection.