The Boat People: An Essay by Michael Dennis Browne

In late March 2026, the literary and musical communities mourned the passing of Michael Dennis Browne, an internationally acclaimed poet and librettist who for many years taught creative writing at the University of Minnesota.

Minnesota Orchestra followers may know Browne best as the librettist for To Be Certain of the Dawn, the Holocaust memorial oratorio composed by Stephen Paulus and premiered by the Orchestra in November 2005, then reprised and recorded in February 2008; collaborating ensembles on these occasions included the Minnesota Chorale, Minnesota Boychoir, Basilica Cathedral Choir and Cathedral Choristers. It was one of many times Browne collaborated with Paulus before the composer's passing in 2014.

In February 2008 Browne contributed a reflective essay to the Minnesota Orchestra's Showcase program magazine; we reprint it here in tribute to his memory and legacy.

The Boat People

An essay by Michael Dennis Browne

Two summers ago, I went into a church on the Inishowen Peninsula, in Donegal, Ireland, very near where my father’s father was born in 1864, and asked the old sacristan, who was polishing the altar candles, if he knew of the Brownes. “Ah,” he said, “they’re the boat people.”

A shiver went through me then: in many years of writing words for music, I have often likened that process to the building of a boat rather than a house—something firm, buoyant, that will float on the element of music it was designed for. If you build too heavily, when the water comes, it will flood the structure rather than raise it. (And most words for music seen on the page are about as interesting as boats on sand.)

I learned from the local researcher Seoirse Ó Dochartaigh, himself a musician and painter, that almost all the family’s houses or cottages listed in the local records for several centuries are recorded as being “without land attached…in close proximity to the sea.” This was because my ancestors were (and their descendants are) not farmers but seafarers—boat builders, boat repairers, fishermen, ferry operators, and the like—and so the ocean was their land, the waves their acres.

As a librettist, I’ve worked with Stephen Paulus since 1977. Such an involving joy! And with all the complexities of rehearsals, re-writes, dialogues, performances, recordings, the interaction with performers, it’s a very different kind of belonging to the artistic community than the one most poets know, where usually you have much less sense of whether your writing is reaching people in the lives they are living. One writes anyway, and I always will, out of a passion for poetic expression, for all that poetry has sung and proposed and echoed over the centuries. But this life with music, these boats and seas—it is all more than I could ever have dared to hope when I began, more than five decades ago, trying “to articulate sweet sounds together,” as Yeats has it.

It is a collaboration I treasure. I’m not a musician, after all; I’m just descended from boat people from the southern shores of Lough Swilly, and I’ve been working at my trade along the years, shaping and fitting the various woods of words, never able (or inclined) to anticipate what watery acres these craft, of all sizes, may be lucky enough to be launched upon. To Be Certain of the Dawn is the largest sea, the deepest, on which I have been privileged to see them floating. 

– Reprinted from Minnesota Orchestra Showcase magazine, February 2008