On this segment of Voices of Minnesota, MPR’s Dan Olson sits down with one of our region's best known poets Michael Dennis Browne in his home to talk about his life and poetry.

Browne is a native of Great Britian who now lives in the Seward neighborhood of south Minneapolis. He's a professor of English at the University of Minnesota and a tireless public speaker on behalf of poetry.

(This audio is part one of two)

Transcript:

(00:00:00) Mr. Allen, the American called me a dumb cough Father William the Math teachers slap me Father Campbell merely mocked me, but I had a hard time with those areas but my literature teachers who wonderful and they used a tell you the story may have told the story about the piece you read Frank Goodrich of late memory would check the car door to make sure there were no priests around

(00:00:23) then he would read to us the rude bits out of the choices

(00:00:27) Millers tale that were not included in the Catholic edition. Editions of Jaws that we were obliged to you so School censored what the kids got? Oh sure but the love of literature that came from people like like Franco rich and Alan Morrison whom I met last year in England for the first time in 37 years always stayed with me probably resulted in my becoming eventually a teacher but it wasn't like you were a meteor. It wasn't like you were writing off bits of poetry and handing him into the teacher and the teachers saying Michael you're brilliant. Or was it like that? Not at all? In fact Allen said if you're not writing poems by now, maybe you're not destined to be a poet. So I I was average bright kid and I acted in plays but I was not showing signs of particular poetic the spark that started to come later after my dad died. I think that was the real the grief of that was the major

(00:01:20) Catalyst for my

(00:01:21) imagination. Yeah, you hit a couple of extroverts apparently talented extroverts for parents your mother and father your father. Fine musician and your mother currently a fine amateur actress, but here they were locked in a very conventional World your father in a corporate job. I wonder what effect that had on you as you looked at what your parents were really really good at being out there and extroverted and then what they did for a living. Yeah. I was very aware of my dad's struggles within the job that he was obliged to do and he always used to say to me, you know, when you've finished College

(00:01:55) do what you want to do so it so that was a lesson that was passed on to me.

(00:02:00) He's that good advice all the best the advice I try to give to get some kind of basic credential so you can feed your family or feed yourself.

(00:02:09) But then go with you. What is Joseph Campbell say follow your

(00:02:12) bliss. I've been following my Bliss for many years and even getting paid for it. And so you came in to Middle America Midwestern America parachuted into Davenport, Iowa. I think it was you right and you have some great images of what your I picked up when You landed in Middle Midwestern America. It was a whole new world. There. Was that heat lightning all along the horizon. There were the the pools and the barbecues. I wouldn't the my first pizza. I just broke into laughter. I couldn't believe what they was talking object from outer space, you know covered with cheese or still even now, you know, the guns

(00:02:52) on the cops

(00:02:53) belts, even after 30 years. It gives me pause and I really cherish being able to remember

(00:03:00) Those first impressions never to have lost that memory of things like that. It was exotic. I mean Davenport Iowa, it was hot. You could hear the cicadas at night. It was the weather was unstable. I was terribly excited.

(00:03:14) I'm struck by your image. You quote John Berryman about the life of a poet alone in a room with the English language. Wow, that's a that's a great image. You know that that appeals to a lot of people who think of the poet is this singular. Private figure and is that how it works?

(00:03:33) Well, that's how it works to do the work that then must go out into the world.

(00:03:38) It's like when exact Pro man comes to town you don't want to know about his practice you want him to be perfect. But to be that perfect, you know, he's put in his time. The purpose of poetry is to create an effect upon the reader out there in the world that it takes great crafts to enable them to do you've got to give them the ingredients for the emotion that you've been

(00:04:00) Having so

(00:04:01) all writing is solitary I think in it's creating but it's job is out there in the world. The sense I'm picking up is that there is some kind of resurgence in the interest in poetry or upto. Of course, if I ask you if you're picking it up you're going to say of course because that's part of your business. But what do you think? Well, there is

(00:04:19) although I'm not too well in touch with it

(00:04:21) in the Twin Cities, which is an amazing literary Community. You have all these poetry groups and poetry slams and new alternative. Magazines and

(00:04:30) it's it's wonderful. I don't go to

(00:04:32) it. I my life is full enough but there's new generations coming up who are doing Lively work and it's their job to give alternatives to people like me. I mean, I'm you know an old fart to them. Can we say fart on the radio? I acknowledge that, you know that they are the new generations. They're pressing against the generations above them.

(00:04:55) They just started a new program on

(00:04:56) PBS the other night United States of poetry, which I didn't want to I don't like poetry and television he said in a combustion leeway.

(00:05:03) I think it's because song has taken over a lot of what poetry used to do and there's a movement back now to trying to

(00:05:12) bring the oral back into poetry which it won had to reclaim some of the territory from song probably I think video and MTV in the rest is had a big influence on young people

(00:05:22) and they want to have some of the energy of the visual energy of that in the performance of

(00:05:27) poetry. Why wouldn't you like poetry? Tree on television

(00:05:32) Well, it's either too solemn or it's too cute. Is that for one

(00:05:38) offense also, it's very it's very hard to match. It is an image of smoke in a poem. Do you show smoke or not? Show smoke? You don't have too many options. What do you think about how your son and two daughters are being taught lat? How do you think first of all what do you think of how they're being taught to to write and and to use words and then to think about how they write and use words. Well from what I'm seeing my son for example right now is doing a big written project on the Titanic and he's been running his drafts by me this a good stress on the written still. I mean, they're learning computer we A computer Christmas, I would be unhappy if the balance shifted too much and everything was video form but I think the

(00:06:21) old-fashioned virtues

(00:06:23) of writing and

(00:06:25) reading alive and well they're in Balance presently the

(00:06:30) balance may change in the years to come when everything is is visual. Now, I work in the school's a lot and I know that this is more of a visual than a written word generation, but reading still is happening and and they just had this read-a-thon all this lovely readathons and

(00:06:46) who was it last year came in and read that I got the quarterback of the go first to come in and read and the kids were just thrilled

(00:06:52) an expression you have used in talking about writing poetry is Fidelity to experience and what do you mean by that? It's not my term. It's from Denise Lovett off. When I translate it, I say to me that means your poems should be like your life so that you don't write for example some high solemn style of

(00:07:13) poems

(00:07:14) and go home and just act like a total nitwit your

(00:07:17) poems poems take the measure of experience.

(00:07:22) Why should not poems have that range of modulations of

(00:07:26) moods that our lives

(00:07:28) have Pablo Neruda, you know, the you see the movie The Postman gorgeous movie. Anyway talked about the Three of the impure meaning that you have rages and you have exaltations and and meanness has and and bravery's and the poems reflect the mix the poems are like the life. You don't write one life and live another and I think a lot of writers stop writing because their life starts to go one way and they can't take their writing with them into those changes. Did you have a moment like that?

(00:07:58) Sure huge moment. My poems almost almost ceased to be About five years ago.

(00:08:06) So what I did and now that in a sense they were trying is I went with my Pros critical pros of a certain kind and chill writing for children and doing an opera and waited for it to return Red Key says theoretically the end of the poem says a

(00:08:21) lively understandable Spirit once entertained you it will come again be still wait

(00:08:30) and this theater wreck whose work we're looking at he is who How long ago she 1908 and Saginaw Michigan german-american died in 1963 in August face down in the swimming pool on Bainbridge Island age 55 my age

(00:08:46) just a gorgeous gorgeous and complex

(00:08:49) manic-depressive poet and I was loved the music and the energy of his writing. I'm just going to read the third and last part of a poem called Journey to the interior.

(00:09:02) I see the flower of all water above and below me the never receding moving and moving in a parched land white in the Moonlight the Soul at a still stand at ease after rocking the flesh to sleep petals and reflections of petals mixed on the surface of a glassy pool and the waves flattening out when the fishermen drag their Nets over the stones in the moment of time when the small drop form. But does not fall. I have known the heart of the Sun in the dark and light of a dry place in a flicker of fire brisk by a Dusty wind. I've heard in a drip of leaves a slight song After the midnight cries. I rehearse myself for this the stand at the stretch in the face of death. Delighting in surface change the glitter of light on waves and I roam elsewhere my body thinking turning toward the other side of light in a tower of wind a tree idling in are beyond my own Echo neither forward nor backward unpublish EXT in a place leading nowhere. A blind man lifting a curtain knows it is morning. I know this change on one side of Silence. There is no smile. But when I breathe the birds the spirit of Wrath becomes the spirit of blessing and the Dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.