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Morton Marcus: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is the new Poetry Show. I am your host Morton Marcus. I'd like to start out by thanking Plaza Books on Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz for the donation of funds that made this show possible.

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And with the joyous Irish music in the background, I welcome our guest, Michael Dennis Browne, an Englishman who has ancestors on several sides from Ireland. And who, if I may be so bold, his poetry and his personality is well suggested by this music, he

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is a man and a poet who celebrates the small and the large moments of life. A celebrator, a bard. Children, love, adults in all aspects birth, death, just being, is what his poetry is about. And I've been with him for the last

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24 hours, he gave a reading last night at Cabrillo College, and we've been renewing our friendship of years past. Michael, welcome to the new Poetry Show and KUSP. With this music slowly fading out in the background, why don't you tell

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us a little bit about yourself, where you come from, maybe what some of the important parts of your life are all about. Michael Dennis Browne: Okay, well, you call me an Englishman, but I'm not sure I am that. I've been in this country 20 years,

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an American citizen. I- I came over 20 years ago to the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. In terms of my origins, three of my four grandparents were Irish. My grandmothers were Kelly and Murphy and so I feel as some mixed ancestry there.

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I've lived in the Midwest for the past 15 years. I lived in Minneapolis, and also in the north woods of Minnesota, where my family has a cabin. So I have different- different sides to me there, in terms of background.

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Morton Marcus: Well, that's interesting to note, I should also say that, this- this background, if I can add to it, you were born in England in 1940 and you went to Hull University at Oxford. And I know that you majored in French and Swedish,

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and actually were very interested in, first in English poetry, but then in hearing Baudelaire- well just describe to us what the feeling of reading Baudelaire was all about, which I think totally opened you up to poetry.

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Michael Dennis Browne: Yes. When I was in college studying French I began to read in French, some of the poems of Baudelaire from "The Flowers of Evil," "Les Fleurs du mal," and I felt what Victor Hugo described when he wrote to Baudelaire. He talked

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about it in a letter to Baudelaire, about what he called a "frisson nouveau," a new shiver. He said in a very famous passage, "you cast on the sky of art some strange ray, you create a new shiver," which was a big deal coming from Victor Hugo,

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who is the great figure, the great patriarchal figure of French poetry. He had to acknowledge that there was something new in the poetry of Baudelaire. For me, it was something in the sensibility, something in that post-romantic

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sensibility, something in the hard, glittering strange quality of images that just woke up parts of myself that- that English poetry, for all my great love of it, hadn't awoken yet. And so Baudelaire was my second wind of poetry after first

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loving Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Blake, John Clare, and Christopher Smart and so forth. There were subsequent waves, as you know, the next one was American poetry. Morton Marcus: Who were your influences- influences in

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American poetry. I know you read widely and love poets in many different schools over here, but when you came over here, what or who was your influences? Michael Dennis Browne: A couple of main great loves, one was

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Theodore Roethke, who remains a great love. Something in his- in his energy and his music I still love. And then I read, roughly at the same time, James Wright's poems, which I've talked about, and loved those too and felt I wanted to go to the landscape of

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those poems. I also read Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, Anne Sexton, William Stafford. But if I had to choose two to take to a desert island, which I hope I don't have to, be Roethke and Wright, of contemporary Americans.

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Morton Marcus: I know a lot of these people, especially Anne Sexton, Bly, have become, you know, close friends of yours. Maybe we will talk about them a little later. Now let's hear some of these poems which come out of these very different

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traditions of poetry. Why don't you read us some poems? Let me say that Michael has published three books, besides being in a lot of magazines and anthologies. His first book was called, "The Wife of Winter," came out from Scribner's. The

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second book is "The Sun Fetcher," and the third is called, "Smoke from the Fires," that has been released in the past year by Carnegie Mellon, and he'll be reading a lot from that book, and that is our Carnegie Mellon University

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Press. Very, very well known press, which comes out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Please read us some poems, Michael. Michael Dennis Browne: Okay. I'll read you a poem, first from from the other side of the Atlantic, from over the water.

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Only it's England, not Ireland. This is from a visit to England nine years ago and it's called, HIDE AND GO SEEK I count to fifty. Then I appear at the French window. In my

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hand, the three-flame candelabrum. The children have run to hide in my sister's garden. It is March, damp, dark, that English dark I left. I make the monster sound. I give the groan they long to hear, and fear. I can almost feel their

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shivering out there. Then I begin to move. I lurch, stiff-legged. I sway. I am the Mud Man, come still smeared from his swamp. I am something extinct with my rotting fingers, I am the slimy thing from the sea who leaks after them on feet

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horribly like the human hand, but heavier. I am he no longer afraid of fire, who points these prongs of flame to find them. I need some blood. I need to catch me some family flesh and chew it down to the bone. Appalled, they hurtle all over, the nephews,

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the nieces, they scatter, they stream round Fran and Angela's garden, desperate scared, mad scared. Who let this thing loose in England? Run, run, the Bogey Man, the Bog Beast. Run, run. Roaring, reaching out, again and again I miss them, so slow I am

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so sleepy with my swampy blood, miss them just enough to freshen their fear, to send them screaming further into the dark, out behind the beanpoles, behind the compost, behind the favorite tree that is now metal to the touch. I hear, I hear the

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panting. And it is enough. Now it is done. Now I raise the candles to show my friendlier face. I am Michael again, the almost American uncle, and I call to them. All in, all in. Together we go toward the house, through the garden that is

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theirs again, laughing, still thrilled with our fright. Damien, my godson, four, that boy of light I sought in the dark, shouts; "I'm bigger than myself," Whoever the seekers, children, whoever will chase you, if inside you, if behind

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you, may they miss, I pray it. May they not touch, may you make it past such grasping and reach the house as now together we do, where people are waiting who love us, and from darkness welcome us. O mystery of family. O darkness. O house. I pray it;

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All in, all in. Morton Marcus: I couldn't help thinking, as I heard that now and last night, that there is those terrifying primitive images, which Ted Hughes also brings up in "Wodwo" and- go on!

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Michael Dennis Browne: Yeah, and he doesn't- he doesn't bring that kind of tag-in at the end as I do, he leaves you in a much more raw state than I- than I choose to do in that poem. The humor in my poem is comic, it's stylized. That's how children

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rehearse life, through their stylized monsters. I think Hughes is into a very much more nightmarish trip, has a much more raw intention in his poems than I have in mind. Morton Marcus: Well, that's interesting. And last night,

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you- and you said that these were funny poems. I think this is more terrifying because it is brought into a domestic scene and into a scene of children. And even though it is the stylized picture of the "Bogey Man", or as we say over here,

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the boogeyman, it still is very, very terrifying in this context, and especially the way the writing roars up in the center and then the only peacefulness in the end is- there's almost a prayer and-

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Michael Dennis Browne: Its kind of a prayer, one of those dangerous roundings out of a narrative that you have to be careful not to do so that you close the poem up. I just went with an instinct there to make that prayer.

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Morton Marcus: I think it's right. Absolutely. Michael Dennis Browne: Seems to me, were there. Morton Marcus: This is- this is a poem I know, that was on one of several visits back to England, which you do every year

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or so, or maybe that's even too much. And I know there's another one, which is, again, a very celebrational poem, which is also maybe on the last visit you made, and it's called "Lamb." And I wonder if you'd read that to us.

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Michael Dennis Browne: I just happen to have it here, Mort. Morton Marcus: Amazing! Michael Dennis Browne: This was actually two years later, it wasn't the most recent, it was 79 and we were driving around in

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a rented car, my mother, my brother, who was living in Wales at the time, and his pregnant wife and my sister Angela, and we saw this delivery, which I describe in the poem. And as I said last night at Cabrillo that a lot of these poems have a

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quite simple impulse behind them. Something seems to ask me to say it in whatever way I can, and I try to help you see it. You didn't have these words, rhythms, you wouldn't be seeing. That's an ancient impulse, I guess. The poem is called:

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LAMB Saw a lamb being born. Saw the shepherd chase and grab a big ewe and dump her on her side. Saw him rub some stuff from a bottle on his hands. Saw him bend and reach in. Heard two

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cries from the ewe. Two sharp quick cries. Like high grunts. Saw him pull out a slack white package. Saw him lay it out on the ground. Saw him kneel and take his teeth to the cord. Saw him slap the package around. Saw it not move. Saw him bend and

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put his mouth to it and blow. Doing this calmly, half kneeling. Saw him slap it around some more. Saw my mother watching this. Saw Angela. Saw Peter. Saw Mimi with a baby in her belly. Saw them standing in a row by the dry stone wall, in

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the wind. Saw the package move. Saw it was stained with red and yellow. Saw the shepherd wipe red hands on the ewe's wool. Heard the other sheep in the meadow calling out. Saw the package shaking its head. Saw it triy to stand. Saw it nearly

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succeed. Saw it have to sit and think about it a bit. Saw a new creature's, first moments of thinking. Felt the chill blowing through me. Heard the shepherd say; "Good day for lambing. Wind dries them out." Saw the package start to stand. Get halfway.

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Kneeling, Saw it push upward. Stagger, push and make it. Stand, standing. Saw it surely was a lamb, a lamb, a lamb, saw a lamb being born. Morton Marcus: I like the simple declarative statement at the end

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of the poem, which a lot of creative writing workshops they might tell you to cut out, but it just brings back the whole simplicity of the event that you're seeing which you have made so important and it's so dramatic. And then just to sort

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of undercut everything you've done with the whole simplicity, look, this is life, this goes on every day. And you read this poem to somebody, and they virtually advised you to do that, didn't they?

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Michael Dennis Browne: Not quite what- what happened was my sister Angela, who I mentioned, I think I said, I'm going to write a poem after seeing the birth, and I'm going to involve in it too the history of Western civilization and the cosmos and

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the Trinity or some such thing. And she said, "Michael, keep it simple." And that seemed good advice. So I kept it very simple, very simple, very much paying homage to the actuality and I like that in poetry. I like the actual, I like the

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real, because I think the real is inexhaustible. If you watch it closely enough and catch, you know, what Hopkins called the inscape of it, everything is- has its own inscape. So it's a real homage to actuality there. And I like to try and do that

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quite often. Morton Marcus: Then to me, that is my definition of the celebration part. I mean, you're- what you're celebrating is not the wonderful pyrotechnics of fourth of July

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that goes on inside the imagination, but the actual wonder of existence all around us. Michael Dennis Browne: There are times that are- that ask that of you, that are more fantastical or more interior, more

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imaginative. And I have in my life written poems that are almost entirely internal. But more and more, I'm drawn to the phenomenological, I'm glad I got that word out, phenomena and I look there, for what Rilke calls somewhere, "equivalence in the

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visible world," the things seen inwardly, things sensed inwardly. My work is probably changed that way. I think in the first book, there was an awful lot of hallucinatory kind of stuff in there with other kinds of things but my, my interests

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are more and more toward, as it were, the external which is an analog for something internal. Morton Marcus: You think, there's still questions [unintelligible] Do you think it has to do with the times? I

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mean, was hallucinatory poetry part of the times back in the end of the 60s? Michael Dennis Browne: Oh sure, sure. When music suddenly got literate and got druggie at the same time and I discovered music

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and discovered drugs. Absolutely. I think it's a sign of the times and also the sign of my own time. That is I'm 45, middle aged by many definitions and I think that- I think you do start to pare things down and make some choices and hone down

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to- to certain essentials. I think it happens in a lot of poets. I do think also that American poetry is trying to catch up with some- some delinquencies, some lack of attention to some pretty tough external- I mean, some totally

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tough, external realities. And is trying for what Milosz calls in his book of this name, "The Poetry of Witness." I think, whatever you think of Carolyn Forché's book, "The Country Between Us," which I have very mixed feelings about, it

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certainly woke us up to the fact that in our idiom there was some stuff we have not been dealing with. Morton Marcus: Okay, could you be more specific about this, being a witness to reality?

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Michael Dennis Browne: Forché went to Salvador, and spent a couple of years there and saw a lot of very tough things, saw people in cages where they could neither stand, nor sit; saw evidence of all kinds of torture and- and rape and all the

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terrible things going on with the death squads. And what she's initiated in her book, "The Country Between Us," which came out what- three-four years ago, was the impelling sense that we as artists, be it poets, visual artists, musicians, have to let

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that stuff in and circulate in our own lives, have to make some connection between personal passion and- and common struggle. This is not to say every poem is a political poem, I don't believe that particularly. It just means that

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we should let those things in when they insist on entrance, because I do think that certain events insist on entrance, and we are so walled-off from them that we don't let them in. It's complex issue mode, as you know, we've talked a little bit about

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it. I think there are many occasions in life on many levels, and they require different kinds of poems from us. But I think that we have to make connection, we have to take the lives of others, the fates of others, as passionately and

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seriously as our own and make connection that way. I think the times ask it of us. Morton Marcus: I also am very concerned with this question, as you know, and I'm also very concerned with the fact that a

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lot of my answers, and maybe it's because I am an American, a lot of my answers to these solutions are not political in the sense that it would be political to a third world person. I suspect political answers, I suspect people who

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will wield the political power. I also am very concerned with not writing propaganda. Michael Dennis Browne: Oh, no question, no question. There was an issue of poetry, East Magazine, some years ago called

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"Art and Guns," which just turned into an anthology called "Poetry and Politics," and there's a very interesting roundtable in that called "The Red Pen," in which about 20 or 30 editors of magazines talk about their views of political

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poetry. You'll find a couple of things that they have in common, one is they are saying, "How come we are living in the age of the bomb and no one's writing about it? Or living in the age of torture, no one's writing about it?" They also say equally

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emphatically, no matter how sympathetic I am to a certain cause, if the stuff comes in and it's dead on the page as imaginational language, I won't print it just because I'm sympathetic to that- say point of view. Propoganda is a certain

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kind of writing that you see a lot of and there's nobody at risk in a propaganda poem. Robert Bly has an essay about this in that book, it's called, "Leaping Up into Political Poetry." He said the best poets of the Vietnam War were the most

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inward poets, poets who got in touch with inner process, and then began to see analogues out there in exterior process. Neruda says somewhere, and someone in that book quotes it, political poetry is the last kind of poetry you should write

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in your writing career because it's the hardest. Morton Marcus: It's fascinating because, of course, he was a communist from around 1937 on, and felt that he was actually writing for a cause and yet, you can hardly see it in most of his

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poetry. And still, he won, I think several Stalin prizes, actually. Michael Dennis Browne: Well, you see it in the "Elemental Odes " which were a product of th t later period when he honed do

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n his line, chose accessib e subjects without condescensio , just wrote much more tangibl . But again and again poets li e Neruda, Yeats is an obviou example of a poet who struggle and became public because o pressure at the times. A poet l

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ke Cardenal, whom we've tal ed about, who under pressure of he times and political commitm nt is writing his documentary po ms like in a book like "Zero Hou ." A poet I admire very much c lled Sharon Olds, who takes- no ably takes the griefs an

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the struggles of others to ally personally. See, I think th re's a misconception about poli ical poetry. I think that yo can write political poetry, et's call it that, committed p etry, successfully - whatev r that means - when you natura

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ly feel the grief and death of others. You feel it personally, ou take upon yourself the- the ersonal grief of a non- ersonal happening that involv s large terms, it inv lves compassion, involves empath , it involves love. It's a- it

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asks an enormous amount of the oet. So I, too, don't like prop ganda or empty polemic in poetry it's easy to write it, it's e sy to write it. I think a revo ution has to happen inter ally, perhaps spiritually befo e you can write authentic pol

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tical poetry. I don't feel a that stage yet. I might aspire o it, but I've got to shed some stuff in myself. I've got to let go of some stuff, includin some barriers that I have Morton Marcus: Let me say that getting back to the "Ele

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et to ental Odes" of Neruda, I- tho gh they may be, in your min , political in maybe the old sen e that I'm using, to me they're elebrational poems, and they vercome that because they are

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inding the wonderful in the mall minutiae of everyday life. Michael Dennis Browne: Well, that's true, and that's one kind of what we might call political writing, "Canto General," is another one in which he, you know, deals with the history of

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Latin America and the kind of desecration, and- and the invasions, and the despotism, that's another level of response. Then you have poems like the "United Fruit Company," and others that are well known-

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Morton Marcus: Definitely satirical politcal poems- Michael Dennis Browne: Which- which approaches the problem of writing that way from another angle. He comes at it in a lot of different ways.

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Morton Marcus: Um, let's have several more poems before we take our break. Michael Dennis Browne: Okay. Morton Marcus: And these are Michael Dennis Browne poems.

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Michael Dennis Browne: I read you a couple of recent ones here, both of which might be along the lines of the kind of more public poem that we're talking about. They both come from last summer. This first one is called "Mengele," and I wrote

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it after reading that- the "Bones of Mengele," Joseph Mengele, the so called "Angel of Death" from the concentration camps, had been discovered, and had been authenticated by experts. So that chapter was apparently closed but I wrote a

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little piece called, MENGELE. Don't tell me about the bones of Mengele, the bones are alive an well. Don't think to thrill me with tales of the drowned b

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nes uncovered, the bones are a ive and well inside the s eeves of a suit this day, and c rving out the figures of a fat c eck, or severing a ribbon with t e ceremonial scissors or holding the head of a child. I tell you, the bones are alive and well.

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Don't expect me to get excited concerning the skull of Mengele. The skull is alive and well. The skull is asquirm with sche es this day, and low words are eaving it at this moment and o her skulls are nodding at what hey hear, seated about the world

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table. I tell you, the skull i alive and well. Don't bother s owing me pictures of the re ains of Mengele, the remains ar alive and well and th ckening in our rivers or limbing into our houses out of he ground where they will not

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e confined, or sliding inside he rain out of the summer air. h yes, the remains are even here, I tell you, are alive are everyw I mentioned love and compassion and empathy a while ago, I

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should also mention anger. A lot of poems come out of what you might call a righteous anger, and words of what you throw at it to try to dislodge something. This other piece that you haven't heard before is a new poem that I guess I'm still

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working on, but I think it's readable. And one of its themes is of course, the comfort of our own lives, in which we try to get through the layers of our comfortable lives to the sufferings and the the aspirations of other people, the

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other lives than our own. The piece I call "Labor Day Weekend, the Ice Cream Van" Morton Marcus: The cord- Michael Dennis Browne: The cord? Is what? I won't touch it. Okay.

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This is called LABOR DAY WEEKEND, THE ICE CREAM VAN. This is from last September. The afternoon half gone, the season more and through the streets the ice cream van, ring ring, ring ring. making its

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rounds woman or man. Still time, still time and someone is mowing a lawn, another raking already a leaf. Oh where are all your possessions stack and enumerate[?] make your little lists and the speed of the earth through space, are you

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acquainted with that? Have you the statistics to hand? In glory somewhere, a river and the rower pauses, fingers a water bead, ring, ring, ring ring. And somewhere an army retreats, the remnants, heads bared like penitence, even the wounded

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walking. Mothers, sons, all. Down other streets the crowd of mourners scatters before the water cannon, the gas spat from canisters and a plague of dogs let loose below the rubber bullets. And those losses unseen, sacrifices below ground

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undocumented, ring ring, ring ring. Torn hands slumped in their chains, limbs unbelievably beaten. For once asleep in the seasonless dungeons, who stain bricks glisten. Where far from our lives the dropped rocks lie, ring ring, ring ring. At the

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bottom, at the bottom, in slime, but their ripples reach us, reach even into such unharmed a room as this, where these words arise. Rooms these victims might dream of whimpering from time to time as doors which never again in woken life can open for them

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open, ring ring, ring ring. Rooms where the beloved unmutilated faces, which never again in what is left of their lives, they can meet and embrace, hearts beating, beating, beating. Await them.

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Morton Marcus: Hello again this is the Poetry Show, Morton Marcus speaking here, and today we are talking with Michael Dennis Browne, the Englishman, who is really an American with Irish ancestry. And before we begin, let me give you our

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announcements for the day. Sweet Williams meeting- reading tonight at 7:30pm will be Joe Drucker, the editor of "Ally," and great energetic force in the community, Candida Lawrence, the editor of "Coydog Review," and Francisco Alarcón. I'd urge you

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to go to the reading that is again the National Writers Union sponsored readings that occur at Sweet Williams at 538 Seabright and that begins at 7:30pm tonight, the only steady reading series in Santa Cruz County, so support it. This is Black

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History Month, last- week before last had on Nate Mackey. I like to remind you of a series of programs that will be on McVaudy's[?] Revenge tomorrow at 3pm, for example, Jonah Jones, the great trumpeter, who was a fixture in some of the finest

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bands of the classic and swing eras. So do listen for that. Again, that is Captain McVaudy with McVaudy's Revenge and that'll come along between- well at 3pm tomorrow. A series of programs. the next one will be on February 27 and again, will

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air at 3pm and will feature Betty Carter, who, as you may well know, for 30 years has been one of the most unique voices in jazz. So this is just a few of the ways that KUSP observes Black History Month with black culture.

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At any rate, we are talking today with Michael Dennis Browne and I hope you have been finding him as provocative, as articulate, and as energetic and joyful as I have. It has been a wonderful 26 and a half hours. Michael, I have been enjoying

00:32:54.210 - 00:33:11.120

this, more than you can possibly imagine. So we will go on and talk more about poetry. And we will start this section by having you read some more. Michael Dennis Browne: Okay. You speak of celebration in terms of

00:33:11.120 - 00:33:28.160

my writing and that pleases me because that's a note I wish always to sound in my work. I think whatever the times, we have an obligation to find articulation of all the joys that we can experience when we do experience them. And I think

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sometimes people feel that poetry is exclusively locked into a totally dark and nightmarish view of life. I think if you- I try to have in my work what Denise Levertov calls, fidelity to experience and when I'm, when I'm angry,

00:33:45.710 - 00:34:02.360

when I'm crazy, when I'm silly, try to make poems of those different occasions. The thing I've been celebrating as you know, most strongly the past year or two, is being a parent for the first time. I'd like to read a couple of poems, which

00:34:02.780 - 00:34:21.800

proceed from my little son Peter, who is now two years and about three months old. And who is back in Minnesota waiting for his distant Dad, I hope- Read[?] a couple of poems about him. This first one is not a celebration, actually. It's

00:34:21.800 - 00:34:35.390

called "Peter and Thunder," and it's like many of the poems I'm trying to write about him, Mort, it's- it watches and observes and tries to record what he's going through. I'm hoping to put these all together in a chat book that I would call, "You

00:34:35.390 - 00:34:52.190

Won't Remember This," poems that will witness and record things that he wouldn't otherwise have any memory of. This is the first time he heard the sound of thunder and this must have been about oh, I suppose about when he's about a year old or

00:34:52.190 - 00:35:09.770

slightly more than a year old. So this poem is called: PETER AND THUNDER Your face when you heard it. How you looked up. How, crouched over toy parts, suddenly you stiffened. How then you turned,

00:35:10.640 - 00:35:29.360

how you stared up in the direction of the thunder. They are at the gates. How then you looked at me, as if I might send them away. As if with a few low-toned, well-chosen words, I could send the thunder-gangs scuttling back through all the

00:35:29.360 - 00:35:49.700

holes in the sky. As if there were no thunder deep down in my own bones, no thunder in yours, little son. That theme of anger, which is in me, as in many is a- is one of those, you know, shadow themes that I haven't sufficiently

00:35:49.700 - 00:36:01.060

dealt with, a lot of anger in me that can go different ways. And that's something I feel I have to work on in myself and my writing. Morton Marcus: Yeah. These are poems of witness, as you say,

00:36:01.060 - 00:36:16.690

but what is wonderful about- me, as I said at the- to me, as I said in the reading last night, is that it is also, and I think this is the only time maybe we do it, that males anyway really observe the process of life happening when they have

00:36:16.690 - 00:36:31.990

children, and they observe the child growing up and different aspects of his just discovering his body. We never noticed it as children but with the child, suddenly we are reawaken to the wonder of life and to the wonder of what it was like even for us

00:36:31.990 - 00:36:42.050

again, we remember. So many adults do not go to zoos, and suddenly are going to zoos again, just to see animals, Michael Dennis Browne: Circuses Morton Marcus: -And circuses, right. Just because they have

00:36:42.050 - 00:36:50.900

children, and suddenly it just wakens up the whole wonder of life. Anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt. I know there will be poems that will show this very clearly that you're going to read right now.

00:36:50.810 - 00:37:03.110

Michael Dennis Browne: I think it's a good thing to talk about. It's a- it's an enormous renewal. It has to feel on some level, to me intuitively, part of some intention that we should at a certain point in our lives when our orbit is if not

00:37:03.110 - 00:37:20.000

decaying, leveling out, comes the surge from under that just lifts the life up again, which is what's been happening to me. Another part of the fascination with it is- is watching someone struggle to acquire language, and until recently when he is

00:37:20.000 - 00:37:36.800

now able to speak a lot of normal sentences, making up words, seeming to be capable of making any sound of any of the world's languages going from Chinese to Lithuanian to Russian in one sentence. This poem doesn't do justice to that at

00:37:36.800 - 00:37:51.470

all, but it's a short poem called "What He Says," in which there are about four different sounds of words that are his own coining, when he was again, I think not quite a year old. It's called

00:37:51.530 - 00:38:14.170

WHAT HE SAYS "Abay!" "Abay!" weeping for no reason I know, for nothing we've done and "Abay!" again, howling as we buckle him into the car seat. Then "Ajah!" as he grabs the ring of shiny colored keys,

00:38:14.200 - 00:38:38.970

and "Datoo!" as he crawls toward the small giraffe fall onto the floor. At the funeral for a young man killed, "Gah!" he yelled as the mourners rushed by. "Gah! Gah!" Morton Marcus: You know, Michael, when you read that, you

00:38:38.970 - 00:38:53.370

sent that to me also. There's something elemental, you were thinking about that yesterday, you know, about what about that word really sort of stops people in their tracks. There's something elemental about that sound that your child has felt

00:38:53.370 - 00:39:16.980

and you have plucked out and put on the page. The poem interestingly to me moves in the original area of Mike McClure's beast poems. And in- in making the sounds that go below language attempting to be articulate of feelings and- and

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that stage below the human language, and yet that sometimes can speak with such a clarity, as I think it does in this poem. A lot of Michael's poems do not make it. Michael Dennis Browne: I never thought of connection with him

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at all, but yeah, in that last sound, especially, I mean, this was a sound he had never made before. And as this incredibly speedy kind of cortège came by, out of him came one of his more primitive sounds and "Gah," is- you can perhaps if you like hear

00:39:45.270 - 00:39:58.610

"God," and they're like, "Oh, God," like a lament or a keening. You can almost hear a curse in there at the same time. And the synchronicity of that was too much to- to let go. Morton Marcus: Well, there's also, I mean, I have felt that

00:39:58.610 - 00:40:16.580

so much of English is really onomatopoetic even when it is an abstract word, and especially those words that come from Anglo Saxon but "Gah" with its sense of God, also as a sense of Gag- that gets caught in the throat you know and a rage-

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Michael Dennis Browne: Yes Morton Marcus: -You see that- that we just can't get out. I mean, what is the- who are you raging against? Because people die, because tragedies happen. Somehow for me too, and for many

00:40:25.490 - 00:40:33.870

of the people who said you know, have heard this over the last year or so, very moving poem, very moving poem. Michael Dennis Browne: I'll read you a couple more Morton Marcus: Sure

00:40:34.920 - 00:40:47.530

Michael Dennis Browne: Ones about Peter, these are more plainly, these are lighter pieces. This is called: HIS TOYS We planned to keep your first toys, preserve them. One day

00:40:47.530 - 00:41:03.100

when you are grown, lead you to a secret closet, watch you pull wide, amazed, rediscover your treasures, but we can't. You're eating them. And actually, Mort, I'll tell you a modest secret. There are

00:41:03.100 - 00:41:13.660

two more stanzas to this poem. But last night at the reading, I read it as I read it today and stopped there because I think that's the funniest thing in the poem. The rest kind of flushes it out, but I'm gonna-

00:41:13.750 - 00:41:18.490

Morton Marcus: Could you do that? Flush it out today. Michael Dennis Browne: Okay, Morton Marcus: Okay. That'd be interesting for the listeners, I'm sure.

00:41:18.550 - 00:41:25.750

Michael Dennis Browne: Okay, Morton Marcus: Because I thought it was perfect the way it ended and every one at the reading, you know, broke into laughter. Michael Dennis Browne: All those people at the reading-

00:41:26.980 - 00:41:38.680

Morton Marcus: We had a reading for around 700 people last night. We just didn't have a large enough room for. Michael Dennis Browne: So I'll pick up the line in the first stanza, which is the new ending: But we can't, you're eating

00:41:38.680 - 00:41:57.010

them. Here's what I'm going to edit out. Some are slow to go. That tough copy of Picture Book One is dying by inches from the corners in. It's going nobley, but it's going. What five teeth can do. The giraffe you bit in half, the

00:41:57.010 - 00:42:15.160

special one you loved which Lars, our special pal, especially gave you, snap. Whatever you're going to become when you're a man, cross sentimentalist off your list. We thought we'd hoard, for whose sake really? Those shiny plastic

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keys, the fat little yellow car with eyes, the blue elephant that gurgles. All you first sat and played innocently among, but you've taken the prospect out of our hands and into your fierce little mouth. You're eating them.

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Don't think that works. I think I've made my joke in the first stanza. Morton Marcus: It's fascinating how poems find their way, and we just can't sometimes see them till years after or certainly

00:42:45.040 - 00:42:53.300

after we think we've written them. I- Its happened to me so many times. Michael Dennis Browne: Absolutely, and I think [unidentified] Marianne Moore has a long poem called, "Poetry," begins, "I,

00:42:53.300 - 00:43:07.790

too, dislike it." And it appears in the anthologies often in its whole length, and then a little footnote, saying, "At a certain stage in her career, Marianne Moore cut out all but the first three lines." They print the whole poem, but they show you

00:43:07.790 - 00:43:21.060

where she made her decision. Ezra Pound has- has a phrase, in where you have to learn to kill your darlings, it's good advice. Morton Marcus: Now, this is really interesting, and I'm not going to get into it, but I quoted that phrase, "You have to

00:43:21.060 - 00:43:36.930

kill your darlings." And I quoted it as being by William Faulkner and then, this is when I was up in Portland doing a series of readings around a month ago, and Vern Rusala from the audience said, "No, it is someone I'd never even heard of,

00:43:36.960 - 00:43:51.450

a Victorian, and that Faulkner must have gotten it from him." And so I said, "Oh!" and now you're saying that it was Pound. Michael Dennis Browne: We've both been teaching so long that who knows where we got our uotes from, I yeah, I mean,

00:43:51.450 - 00:44:05.160

ost quotes, I can say, Oh no, I an tell you it's in bits here nd so forth. Like I remember he Rilke quote was from, "The otebooks of Malte Laurids rigge," but the Pound, I think t might be from, "The ABC of eading." Let's have a contest

00:44:05.160 - 00:44:13.000

nd see who can find out first where it really comes from. Morton Marcus: All right folks out there, listening in. We'll be offering you- Michael Dennis Browne: I said it's Pound for years, and you've

00:44:13.000 - 00:44:19.700

been saying Faulkner. Morton Marcus: Yeah. And I- and Vern was insistent- Michael Dennis Browne: That it was a Victorian Morton Marcus: Yeah, I- A guy is named Eddington or something

00:44:19.700 - 00:44:32.210

like that or Edgerton, or something I'd never heard of. I heard of Eddington. Well, let's go on with this. And I also wanted to talk and I'm seeing I'm looking up and seeing that we've got like 12 minutes left and I'm not believing it. You

00:44:32.210 - 00:44:41.110

have another poem to read, so wh don't you read one more poe about your boy or several mor if you want Michael Dennis Browne: No there's one more, this is again about Peter and it's called, "Dancing for Him." This is from

00:44:39.720 - 00:44:51.490

DANCING FOR HIM when he was about a year old and still in, using the plaype . He likes to watch us dance, we do it for him. He laughs, we

00:44:51.490 - 00:45:10.150

waltz around him in the kitchen or polka, leaping, through the living room. He laughs, or cheek-to-cheek. Like a dragged out marathon couple, we slouch and stagger, he throws back his months old head and laughs. What he'll remember of these times,

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who knows? Maybe one morning, waking from a dream of faces, he'll turn to one beside him saying, "That's it! They used to dance for me." Morton Marcus: Wow, that poem for some reason even chokes me

00:45:27.550 - 00:45:43.840

up today after I've heard it around three times. I guess it's a movement of time in there, that is so extraordinary. It is such an extraordinary projection. [unintelligible] Michael Dennis Browne: Well, I mean, things turn to time

00:45:43.840 - 00:45:59.200

instantly and I think- I think you can go through life, mourning the present, ripping off the present, as someone once said. I tried to do it there in a somewhat sprightly way and not predominantly nostalgically, project what it might be like

00:45:59.200 - 00:46:13.450

for him one day. It's exactly as you said, as you do these things that you haven't done since you were a kid, with your offspring, you begin to remember things your parents must have done, different ways to nurture you, or give you things that you have

00:46:14.560 - 00:46:32.680

swallowed down in your unconscious. It's a huge theme. I think that it's very easy to get sentimental and excessive, and the miracle of it, the miracle of the existence of the new life, the miracle of existence, can get clouded by

00:46:32.680 - 00:46:49.750

self pity. So I hope the proportions are well judged there, I'm not mourning myself there at all. I'm just hoping one day that he will be loved and well loved and will recognize one of the sources of his ability to love in what

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we're doing for him now, which is among other things, dancing for him, and being joyful around him. Morton Marcus: It's great, wonderful. Please read some more poems, Michael, I begin to feel there's so much of your poetry

00:47:03.700 - 00:47:16.790

we've not even touched here. Michael Dennis Browne: Okay, thank you. One area of- of writing that interests me, one landscape is- is a cabin that we've built up in the north woods, 200 miles from

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Minneapolis where I teach. And we'll be going up there, my wife and I and then two children, because we're expecting a second child in September, for a sabbatical. I write a lot of poems up there. Let me read you two poems from that landscape.

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One from the third book, "Smoke from the Fires," and then a newer one. This is a poem called "Thinking I Heard a Cry Among the Trees." One of the things this poem is saying I think is that even in the most remote or bucolic or rural setting, menace

00:47:51.620 - 00:48:06.570

comes through, sounds of the world come through. Maybe that's totally wrong, I should not try and interpret it. THINKING I HEARD A CRY AMONG THE TREES It could have been any creature, could have been no cry.

00:48:07.740 - 00:48:30.390

Something I thought I heard as I ran that dirt road early. Could have been in these miles and miles of forest, a tree itself. Some pine a wind has moaned around once too often, some aspen too rotten. It could have been a bird whose nest's taken

00:48:30.600 - 00:48:56.040

or who takes another. Its triumph. It could have been some creature in a trap a man set or one by its own kind caught. It could have been no cry. It could have been something not born for speech, the one time in time it tries for its name and fails. It

00:48:56.040 - 00:49:19.650

could have been the last of the dark's name for the last of the dark or the curse that the dark in going calls to the first of the light. It could have been something I lack, the means to receive something I need to leave the familiar for. Or it

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could have been no cry. Nothing at all. No cry I heard as I ran that early road. The second, another poem, more recent poem from the woods is a much more relaxed kind of poem that just kind of fell out onto

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the page of my notebook last October, when I was digging up the last of our potatoes. In a little patch, we have of potatoes, we call Potato Park, rather grand term for what it is. Here's a little poem called

00:49:54.300 - 00:50:16.240

POTATOES, OCTOBER Potatoes, that's what I'm after and that's what I find with my fork, at the first turning seven, red ones, all sizes. Last night's hard frost above was just a buzz to them. Why are the

00:50:16.240 - 00:50:37.900

crows suddenly calling back down the hill? Is the spud some god to them? They can have these green tomatoes instead, frozen clear through but convincing from a distance; rare globes of jade. Let the crows get down on their stringy knees to these

00:50:38.740 - 00:50:53.220

while I help the seven spuds make good their escape into hot water. Morton Marcus: Michael we still have time, believe it or not, for more poems, which is great. One of the things I was going to

00:50:53.220 - 00:51:05.340

talk about and talk to you about, and may get you some- some idea of something you'd probably did not want to read, are poems that even illustrate more than these poems, which certainly do, the sense of music and language, which I'm talking

00:51:05.340 - 00:51:19.860

about in these programs continually. And certainly a bardic poet, a celebration poet is one who rides the wings of the music language. And we've been hearing that in your poems, the Lamb poem and all of them, even the wonderful descriptions

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of the creature, in "Hide and Go Seek" is just full of musical things and you slow it up with swamp descriptions, brilliant ways, you're, you're slowing a line in the language down to get the plod of this monster's feet. Read us one or two of these

00:51:36.810 - 00:51:54.490

problems, and then sign off with a poem that you would like to. Michael Dennis Browne: Why don't you just keep talking, I'm going- Here are two poems that I hope have music in them and I do think sound and poetry is- very important to me, and to poetry.

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Here's a short poem called "Dream at the Death of James Wright," that I wrote the day- the night of the day I learned that he died. Morton Marcus: This is James Wright, the great poet?

00:52:03.430 - 00:52:13.840

Michael Dennis Browne: The great poet, one of the poets that drew me to this country 20 years ago, who died six years ago next month. He died on the 25th of March. DREAM at the death of James Wright.

00:52:15.960 - 00:52:32.400

The wind is rolling the buffalo down. The wind is shining and sharpening the buffalo and rolling them down. The sheep have already scattered towards the forest, sheep are streami g along the stained edges of t e forest. But the wind is rolli

00:52:32.400 - 00:52:51.150

g the buffalo down. We have n t built a shelter for them, e have put up no corral. Th y don't know enough to co e together, bind their black f r together, sit out the storm I see one huge one struggli g inside a lantern of grasses.

00:52:52.200 - 00:53:09.080

The wind is rolling the buffalo down, shining and sharpening them and rolling them down. I do a lot of writing for children and do you have time for two shorter ones? Okay. This is a poem for children called

00:53:09.080 - 00:53:18.850

"Tree of Two Birds." I was going in to teach one winter, feeling wintery and there were two birds setting off that mood. It's called TREE OF TWO BIRDS. It's been set to music.

00:53:20.500 - 00:53:42.130

Tree of two birds, tree of two birds, all winter long I have heard your song and my heart has been like a tree of two birds. When it was cold, cold, cold; when the snow flew, when the clouds rode down, down, down; such song from the bare branch,

00:53:42.160 - 00:54:03.280

sweet throat, sweet throat; all winter long. Even the darkest days how you plant your notes in my heart, like a fountain, green fountain in winter, fountain of my friends like my family singing to me. O Brother. O Sister bird from the twigs of

00:54:03.280 - 00:54:20.270

winter. Tree of two birds, tree of two birds, feeding me with your song all winter long. And the last little poem Mort also a little poem for children that I wrote after seeing the trees in our street in

00:54:20.270 - 00:54:35.180

Minneapolis cut down because of the Dutch Elm bugs. I'll finish with this, I imagine a child saying this poem. And to say what a wonderful exhausting 27 hours this has been in our reunion, it's been fine and I've enjoyed doing your show.

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CHILD'S ELM SONG If there were no trees, I would take my turn and stand in the street in spring with arms wide open in case there were birds who needed a place to sing.

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Morton Marcus: We have been talking with Michael Dennis Browne for the last hour. A poet and teacher from now, America, Minneapolis, Minnesota, who is out here on a reading tour and will read tomorrow, for you people who are interested, at

00:55:09.750 - 00:55:25.320

The Poetry Center of San Francisco State University, and was come down to give a reading at Cabrillo and to talk with us here on KUSP. Michael, you do not come to the West Coast enough. We miss you, come back soon. A reminder, tomorrow on

00:55:25.320 - 00:55:42.540

Captain McNally's revenge show on Jonah Jones the great trumpeter. That will be starting at 3pm tomorrow on KUSP. Right now we are getting ready for the master chef himself, Leon Allen. Leon, anything special today?

00:55:42.000 - 00:55:58.870

Leon Allen: At three o'clock we're going to have a special on Duke Ellington today and we'll just have the usual services. Today we're going to really focus on my man, Mill Jackson. Morton Marcus: All right, Mill Jackson and then a special

00:55:59.620 - 00:56:16.810

portion on the Duke himself, the great Duke Ellington. Next week, Joe Stroud, you all know him, and myself will be here with a special show, a talk with the great American poet John Haynes, who will be spending a week up at the University of California.

00:56:17.230 - 00:56:36.160

So look forward to that, John Haynes who has lived in Alaska, homesteaded up there for a long while, tough, rugged poems of living with nature a very, very wise and tough man. Stay tuned for Leon Allen. This is Morton Marcus checking off with a

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little bit of Ireland.