John Brehm
John Brehm is the author of four books of original poetry: Sea of Faith, Help Is on the Way, No Day at the Beach, and most recently, Dharma Talk. He’s also the author of a book of essays, The Dharma of Poetry: How Poems Can Deepen Your Spiritual Practice and Open You to Joy, and the editor of the bestselling anthology The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, both from Wisdom Publications. With his wife, Feldenkrais teacher Alice Boyd, he leads mindfulness retreats that incorporate Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement lessons, meditation, and mindful poetry discussions. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and can be found online at johnbrehmpoet.com.
Books, Courses & Podcasts
The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy
The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy received the Spirituality & Practice Book Award for 50 Best Spiritual Books in 2017 by Spirituality and Practice Website.
The poems expertly gathered here offer all that one might hope for in spiritual companionship: wisdom, compassion, peacefulness, good humor, and the ability to both absorb and express the deepest human emotions of grief and joy. The book includes a short essay on “Mindful Reading” and a meditation on sound from editor John Brehm—helping readers approach the poems from an experiential, non-analytical perspective and enter into the mindful reading of poetry as a kind of meditation.
The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy offers a wide-ranging collection of 129 ancient and modern poems unlike any other anthology on bookshelves today. It uniquely places Buddhist poets like Han Shan, Tu Fu, Saigyo, Ryokan, Basho, Issa, and others alongside modern Western poets one would not expect to find in such a collection—poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, William Stafford, Denise Levertov, Jack Gilbert, Ellen Bass, Billy Collins, and more. What these poems have in common, no matter whether they are explicitly Buddhist, is that all reflect the essential truths the Buddha articulated 2,500 years ago.
The book provides an important poetic complement to the many prose books on mindfulness practice—the poems here both reflect and embody the dharma in ways that can’t be matched by other modes of writing. Its unique features include an introduction that discusses the themes of impermanence, mindfulness, and joy and explores the relationship between them. Biographical notes place the poets in historical context and offer quotes and anecdotes to help readers learn about the poets’ lives.
Listen to a Wisdom Dharma Chat with John and host Daniel Aitken recorded in October 2023.
The Dharma of Poetry
In The Dharma of Poetry, John Brehm shows how poems can open up new ways of thinking, feeling, and being in the world. Brehm demonstrates the practice of mindfully entering a poem, with an alertness, curiosity, and open-hearted responsiveness very much like the attention we cultivate in meditation. Complete with poetry-related meditations and writing prompts, this collection of lively, elegantly written essays can be read as a standalone book or as a companion to the author’s acclaimed anthology The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy.
Listen to a Wisdom Dharma Chat with John and host Daniel Aitken recorded in October 2023.
Dharma Talk
A new volume of original poetry from the bestselling creator of Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy.
In Dharma Talk, award-winning poet John Brehm explores the perennial themes of aging, compassion, emptiness, nonseparation, and more. At once poignant and humorous, Brehm’s gentle, wry poems remind us that the personal and the universal are not different—and point us to the Dharma of everyday life.
Click here to watch the author read the poem “Something and Nothing” from Dharma Talk.
Listen to a Wisdom Dharma Chat with John and host Daniel Aitken recorded in October 2023.
The Poetry of Grief, Gratitude, and Reverence
Explorations on a journey through the darkest and brightest moments of our lives, the poems gathered here are explorations of loss, of thanksgiving, of transformation. Some show a path forward and others simply acknowledge and empathize with where we are, but all are celebrations of poetry’s ability to express what seemed otherwise inexpressible, to touch deep inside our hearts—and also pull ourselves out of our selves and into greater connection with the world around us.
Includes poems by
Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Czesław Miłosz, Seamus Heaney, Billy Collins, Joy Harjo, Danusha Laméris, Ada Limón, Kevin Young, Arthur Sze, Ellen Bass, Li-Young Lee, Natasha Trethewey, and many more, plus the editor’s essay on appreciative attention.
John had recorded guided poetry meditations to accompany several of the poems found in this anthology. To learn more and listen to these meditations, please click here.
Listen to a Wisdom Dharma Chat with John and host Daniel Aitken recorded in October 2023.
John Brehm: Dharma Talk (#181)
To our valued listeners, an unfortunate outcome of live events is that you only get one take to get things right, technical difficulties can and do happen and as a result, the audio recording in this podcast fails to meet the Wisdom standard. However, we wish for all of our supporters to be able to enjoy the wonderful content included in this conversation. Please be advised some poems have been replaced with an updated recording, to enhance the listening experience.
This episode of the Wisdom Podcast, recorded live as a Wisdom Dharma Chat features special guest John Brehm. John is the author of several books of poems, The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy and The Dharma of Poetry, Sea of Faith, Help Is On the Way, and No Day at the Beach. He is the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and his poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, The Sun, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Writer’s Almanac, The Norton Introduction to Literature, Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches for Literary Arts and Mountain Writers Series in Portland and for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado.
In this episode, host Daniel Aitken and John discuss:
- John’s process for writing poetry;
- The art of appreciative reading and how to incorporate this in your practice;
- John selects poems from his newest collection, Dharma Talk, to read and guides us through reflecting on them; and
- much more!
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John Brehm: The Dharma of Poetry (#106)
For this episode of the Wisdom Podcast, host Daniel Aitken interviews poet and teacher John Brehm. Wisdom is proud to have published two of John’s books: his collection The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, which came out in 2017, and his 2021 book The Dharma of Poetry.
In this episode we explore the fascinating and profound territory where spirituality and poetry come together, with John as our expert guide. John shares specific practices and ideas that will deepen and enhance your experience of reading poetry, including:
- the specific techniques he uses for teaching the integration of poetry and spiritual practice;
- how to mindfully read and reflect on your favorite poems, interacting with them on a deeper level;
- how to approach poems from a nondual perspective, and how poems in turn can create a nondual experience for the reader;
- what a meditative writing process looks like;
- what it means to become intimate with a poem;
- and much more.
John Brehm is the author of three books of poems—Sea of Faith, Help Is On the Way, and No Day at the Beach—and the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. He teaches at the Mountain Writers Series in Portland, Oregon and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. He also offers a monthly Poetry as Spiritual Practice gathering online and leads mindfulness retreats with his wife, Alice Boyd, that include movement, guided meditation, and mindful poetry discussions.