Michael Dennis Browne News
An Introduction:
Michael Dennis Browne is the avuncular dean of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota. Browne joined the English faculty at Minnesota in 1971, a fledgling poet in a lion's den of literary scholars and grand old men (Leonard Unger, Samuel Holt Monk, John Berryman). Browne's accomplishments include seven poetry collections, two Minnesota Book Awards, three excellence in teaching citations, various fellowships, and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated oratorio. Recognizing this long career of enthusiastic instruction and empathic inspiration, the University of Minnesota's Department of English has established a new graduate fellowship for student poets in the name of Professor Browne.
"It's a great honor," Browne says, interviewed during a sabbatical that allowed him to be a MacDowell Colony Fellow, where he wrote in the same studio in which Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town. "I'm very grateful - grateful and humbled."
The award will allow a student of poetry to concentrate on honing his or her craft in the manner of the man who inspired it. Browne, at age 66, reports that "the pot is bubbling right now." He is preparing the collection My James Wright and Other Essays for publication by Carnegie Mellon in 2008. In addition, he's writing a memoir, putting together a new libretto with his musical collaborator, composer Stephen Paulus, and composing poetry for a new collection. He recently wrote the text for Requiem by young composer James Eakin. "I'm just grateful [inspiration is] around, waking me up in the night, saying, Write this down,"' Browne enthuses cheerfully "I like to work!"
When he speaks to undergraduate writers, Browne emphasizes the poetic necessity of bringing disparate parts together to discover satisfying, if inchoate, connections. So it shouldn't be surprising that when asked what he likes about teaching, Browne begins talking about family, whether the Irish-Anglo one he was born to in Surrey, England, or the one here that with his wife Lisa McLean he helped create. "I think I have a paradigm there of a collectivity of people who are going to have a good time together," he explains, expatriate accent still putting a song to his speech.
"I noticed once when I did a reading at AWP [the Associated Writers' Programs Conference] that a lot of my 'better known' poems have been about groups of people," Browne continues, citing "Handicapped Children Swimming," "Lamb," and "Hide and Seek": "To be simplistic about it, I like getting people together. And I love young people more and more, feel more tender toward them. I listen better than I used to."
With the tenderness has come a bit more distance, or vice versa, says the man who has won the College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Teacher Award, the College of Continuing Education Distinguished Teacher Award, and the Morse-Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. "I don't know as much about their lives as I used to. My son has a My Space page, and you read those, and it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck." He grimaces playfully. "Between My Space, YouTube, and Ipod, I think there's an inclination to be more inward. I recently judged a poetry contest [for the University of Michigan], and my Lord was that writing interior! I was pulling what's left of my hair out." Browne laughs. "But at the same time there's all the performance and hip hop-influenced stuff going on. I think the constituencies are diverse."
Browne may have more of an understanding of music-related texts than most poetry professors. His parents modeled their love of music: his businessman father an organist, choirmaster, and pianist in his spare time, and his mother a singer. He grew up singing in choirs and began collaborating with composers while a student teacher at Oxford. When he arrived at Minnesota, he went looking for a musical partner and was directed to Paulus, then a PhD student in music. Together they have built up a body of work that includes the repertory standard "Pilgrim's Hymn" and the celebrated Holocaust oratorio To Be Certain of the Dawn (which is scheduled to be recorded by the Minnesota Orchestra in early 2008).
"When you're the poet, you're Napoleon," Browne jokes. "But when you're in rehearsal, it's like that family dynamic: you have to shift, adjust. I like being around musicians; I'm in heaven at rehearsals."
Perhaps it's the more interdependent discipline of providing words for music that has shifted the nature of Browne's solitary pursuit, poetry. Browne recently presided over the publication of Panthers, an art book of poems, with Indulgence Press. The poems, as Browne notes, are "little, little things," potent shards engulfed in white space. "In Christian theology, there's via positiva and via negative," Browne describes. "'Positiva' means you say God is a judge, or Heaven is a garden. 'Negativa' is like Buddhism, no images. The space behind, around, between words, is more interesting to me. Less blather, more silence. It's probably an age-typical thing. More mystery behind and around the language, less obvious language.
"I've always been a little bit earnest as a writer," Browne confides, with a twinkle, "but I think I'm more oblique than I was. I like that."
Article by Terri Sutton, copyright 2007 Regents of the University of Minnesota,
republished with permission of English@Minnesota, the alumni magazine of
the Department of English at the University of Minnesota.