Who knows why we fall in love with certain poems? We print them out, pin them up on our doors and walls and mirrors, save the tattered books and chapbooks in which they first appeared to us. Is it the language, the subject, a particular phrase, the mysterious way they line out, the sound of them aloud, the way they resonate in your own silence when you read them just to yourself?
Academicians will say it’s a matter of voice, I suppose. That is such a complex matter…indefinable really, the way a person’s voice comes off the page and, through some mysterious process of eye or sound, enters into another person’s mind. Sometimes, it takes up lodging there.
I met the poet and lyricist Michael Dennis Browne as a young arts manager taking over daily management of the Poets in the Schools program from its founder and muse Molly LaBerge. Molly’s genius was to embed poets in school settings, where their unconventional selves could sit with children, each encouraging the language of the other. Working with Molly was my entrée into the Minnesota poetry community of that time; my own language was greatly shaped and sharpened by all that listening. Michael Dennis was a star.
When, after that period, I turned to the classical theater, I carried the poetry with me into that other arena where close attention to language is a great reward of the work. That life, which I loved, was in a way subterranean. Months come and go, time passes, and while you are enthralled, the outside world wags on. Is it spring? Summer? If it’s snowing when you leave the theater, it is winter.
During those years, I deployed Michael’s poem as a reminder of the world outside the backstage. Every March 21, I posted it on the callboard, that informational nerve center, at my current theater. As the company signed in, they read about Bach, about spring, about “…building those sounds/ in the limitless acres of the ear…” which we were also doing with Shakespeare, or Chekhov. The poem was always gone by the next day; someone pulled it down to read again.
Michael Dennis Browne’s Bach’s Birthday is long and full of beauty and has been lodged in my heart for decades. It begins as the poet attempts to play the First Invention, so I show a photo of my copy, marked by my piano teacher of long ago. (If you’re a pianist, pull out your copy of the music; I daresay your fingers will remember it.)
I invite you to read the whole poem (https://bit.ly/bachs-bday-poem); here I excerpt the first stanza, and a later one, as an enticement.
From Bach’s Birthday (Vernal Equinox, March 21, 1974)
by Michael Dennis Browne
I am stuck in the First Invention.
The eleventh measure. I can’t get it right,
co-ordinate the left hand and the right hand,
I play sharps for naturals, the left hand
is arthritic. It is awful.
And later…
Today is windy, cold, but bright.
A thin snow on the streets.
You would not think our hemisphere
was leaning toward the sun again.
But it leans, all the records say so,
and my blood leans toward the sun too,
and toward Bach.
As I write, it is 2026, and March, and windy and cold, but bright. We are near the vernal equinox. I still play the First Invention without getting it right, but my blood leans, as the poet says, toward the sun, and toward Bach. Perhaps yours does, too.
***
Bach’s Birthday is used by permission of the poet, and is contained in The Sun Fetcher, by Michael Dennis Browne, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1978. Others of my favorites from that brilliant book: Ways of Looking at Snow Dog. The Piano. Epithalamion/Wedding Dawn (“…we are in a company whose music surpasses its pain…”) I hope you can find a copy.
Photo by the author.
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