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 of his early career in the arts, his travels to China, and his new work.

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) You're a writer prose writer poet and of course in a couple of different parts of your life
(00:00:06) a stage actor. I was going to be an actor. I thought you still are.
(00:00:10) Well, I have to say it that I love
(00:00:13) to read and I hope I'm actively in an okay. Not a hammy way, but to
(00:00:18) get to read to others
(00:00:20) my own work and others work with all the energy I have is like a major pleasure, but in early on I was going to be an actor.
(00:00:29) Yes someone once said Said Michael eats ham for breakfast and I have my moments
(00:00:33) but I love to do it. I love to do it. Let's see. I think you write in one of your stories about age 17 you muff to one important line that you had in the
(00:00:41) plead guilty at the theater Royal York. My only professional gig and I said in a moment of distraction at the matinee not guilty. That was the end of my professional career or so you thought and then a
(00:00:55) few years later their you pop up on tour with soon to be found. Of Monty Python for crying
(00:01:01) out loud. Actually, that was true. I had just left high school when I did when I did the the bad thing about the not guilty.
(00:01:09) Well when I was in college, I spent a year after three years at holiday Oxford and I
(00:01:12) happened to be in various acting groups and two of the Lively of people there were Terry and Michael haven't seen them since but I'm glad they're rich and famous and funny and
(00:01:24) what great names to drop in conversation that you've been on stage. You write that you travel to China and and I don't think you've been able to spend a lot of time there, but you certainly spoke to audiences there in dozen and a half or so lectures and I was curious at your reaction to their reaction to Western poetry. How do you think it translated?
(00:01:51) I remember after one talk I gave at the Beijing University there the Beijing Normal University.
(00:01:59) Should say on on some of the founders of modern poetry like pound and
(00:02:03) Eliot. And they would sit and listen
(00:02:05) very avidly and
(00:02:07) all these reel-to-reel tape
(00:02:08) recorders recording every syllable that I that I had spoken which is very scary the end of the
(00:02:14) lecture the talk which had made as Lively and straightforward as I could one man stood it sat at his desk shaking his head and he said too many imaginations. It's kind
(00:02:27) of overwhelming. This was a university where they were have been teaching English language and wanted to switch to
(00:02:30) literature and I was brought in very lucky for me, too.
(00:02:34) Give some of the main indications
(00:02:36) of what happened with modernism in the 20th century and you have to deal with Eliot and pound and other people so I tried in a very listener friendly way to explain what was going on.
(00:02:47) I found that I use a lot of body language. I had to kind of mine things. You know, if Elliot says if I am pinned wriggling to the wall, and I would I would go put my back to the wall and wriggle one thing. I'll tell you I found was I hadn't realized that how
(00:03:01) much of our poetry requires a knowledge of the judeo Christian mythology think of all the references to biblical things in our literature even passing aleutians to them. It
(00:03:12) means nothing
(00:03:14) and by contrast if we read the poems from China would we appreciate what half a third of what they write?
(00:03:23) No, I mean the image of the moon or the Lotus or the River or the pain which has layers and layers of Association going back thousands of years. We could into it a little bit of that but not So that was a sobering
(00:03:37) thought but I think they
(00:03:38) loved they loved aspects of the imagery.
(00:03:44) It just is
(00:03:45) denser and faster
(00:03:48) than the way they tend to write.
(00:03:50) I sometimes think of it as like shortwave television BLiP BLiP BLiP BLiP BLiP and it was a little too
(00:03:54) Speedy for them, but they were great listeners.
(00:03:59) So, where do you want to go? What pieces are you working on currently? What kinds of things are on the desk? I Of several
(00:04:05) projects. I just about finished revising a selected poems that's coming out at about December a sample of 30 years of writing 1965
(00:04:15) 295 all in a hundred fifteen pages are very tight book. I'm revising my children's
(00:04:20) novel cooked is called the last of
(00:04:22) the stones for the fourth time having had some quite tough criticism of it from a very good Minnesota writer for
(00:04:27) Jilly it tough criticism meeting
(00:04:30) saying you better change these 17 things before you have a chance of getting it. Published so that was good it really Drew my attention. I've got a secret already in mind to the children's novel which is set in Minnesota, which is going to be fun. I started the summer. I'm working on a church Opera
(00:04:45) now with my good buddy Stephen paulus that House of Hope will do next year which I'm very excited by based on a tall story short story
(00:04:52) and I have this ongoing
(00:04:53) project God help me
(00:04:56) this
(00:04:56) non-fiction book, which is part Memoir Anglo American Memoir, but
(00:05:01) very much an oral history of some of my friendships. Based on walking
(00:05:05) interviews that I've been doing these last three years in England and Scotland and Wales and in the Minnesota,
(00:05:12) but in the last five years, I've become a
(00:05:14) much better listener more interested in listening.
(00:05:18) I know what I didn't know 30 years ago that I'm not the center of the
(00:05:21) universe and and I'm trying to to take the measure of things as I see them now in my mid-50s people ask me. How do you see writing now compared to 20 30 years ago. I have a To dance it, but I'll try and say it freshly.
(00:05:37) I find it
(00:05:38) harder in a sense to write the juices. Don't flow quite as much. But they do flow but also a much more excited by the size of the issues. I'm trying to deal with things are
(00:05:51) larger, but I think you referred to it earlier your 55 you don't look it. But you're a little more interested in issues relating to spirituality
(00:06:01) spirituality the world order what world were making for our children.
(00:06:06) Yeah, all manner of issues that don't require me spinning egocentric lie at the
(00:06:10) center of everything. I'm
(00:06:12) properly Humbled by what life
(00:06:13) has been revealing to me. We realize of course that at a certain point you made a decision to become a United States citizen you had to renounce your British citizenship, which is something most of us never have to do we never have to renounce their citizenship and I wonder what your impressions of that
(00:06:28) process were. I had to renounce the queen
(00:06:31) that was no problem. No problem at all. Well, it was a very emotional thing, but it was more a coming toward
(00:06:40) America than giving Up of England
(00:06:44) to say that I am the son of British
(00:06:46) parents, but I am the grandson of three irish-born people. My mother's father was born in England. So my englishness was not long-established. I'm more Celtic than English in a sense.
(00:07:00) First time. I went to Dublin walk down O'Connell Street. I thought these are my people. I mean, they'll look like me and my family, you know, big noses and round faces Redskin. I felt I belonged for the first time but it was very much.
(00:07:13) love for the American land and and and American Life aspects of it American literature rather than turning my back on
(00:07:23) England. There was a period when I was quite snotty
(00:07:25) toward English things I've written about
(00:07:26) that. Now I go back as often as I can
(00:07:28) and even taking the whole family one crazy unrepeatable time.
(00:07:33) I really love England. I just have been able to breathe
(00:07:36) here in ways. I may be couldn't have done there. Although maybe I could
(00:07:41) we really would like to hear something that you've written that you either have in progress or something from the past and you have a selection there.
(00:07:49) I'll read you a poem that I wrote within the last month which I put into the new poems of the new book.
(00:07:56) It's called the
(00:07:57) now the long ago
(00:07:59) it's based on sitting on that couch that chatting with my daughter Nellie who is 6 and it's the first time I've ever written in this form. The form is called the
(00:08:07) villanelle when you'll hear you repeat certain lines. It's not an easy form, but it a little voice said to me there should be a villanelle. So it's called the now the long ago. In the dream time of the swarming snow. We're on the couch. Just chatting you and I here in the now they're in the long ago. The world outside is singular and slow
(00:08:33) as if the winter taught all
(00:08:35) things to sigh here in the now they're in the long
(00:08:39) ago. I'll make our supper then we'll watch a show and then you'll choose some
(00:08:45) stories by and by in the dream time of the swarming snow. So many things that you don't need to know about the years
(00:08:55) the years that
(00:08:56) simplify in the dream time of the swarming snow.
(00:09:00) This won't go on
(00:09:01) forever child. Although I've never had the words to tell you. Why here in the now they're in the long ago
(00:09:09) won't be for
(00:09:10) always little love. And so we'll take this all as blessing you and I in the dream time of the swarming snow here in the now they're in the long ago.
(00:09:29) Very nice. The father's words.
(00:09:31) Well, I was very aware sitting there just chatting with Nelly, you know, there's just it's a certain afternoon and it's a moment of without significance and thinking how often I flash upon a little moment with my Dad or Mom all those long years ago, and if I could have that back for a moment or remember the name of the street,
(00:09:48) it's just the whole lesson of the preciousness.
(00:09:51) Of every moment and the necessity of attentiveness to it
(00:09:55) at the same time the awareness of time. It's now and one day it will be the precious
(00:10:01) the precious long ago
(00:10:02) and Orden wonderfully described poetry as
(00:10:05) the clear expression of mixed feelings.
(00:10:08) And I think in the noun the long ago, you have it you have great
(00:10:12) joy in being there and a slightly elegiac element because transient things are passing,
(00:10:19) but you live it's both I'm not either or you live with the both you is a wonderful poem by George Herbert that ends
(00:10:27) and all my live long days. I will lament and love and I think that's that's what I'm doing in that poem. I'm loving being with her and I'm aware that one day. It'll be for her the long ago.