Welcome to guided poetry meditations with author and poet John Brehm. We’ve recorded these readings and provided them for your meditation because, as John writes in his introduction to The Poetry of Grief, Gratitude, and Reverence, “hearing a poem read aloud after a period of meditation can feel remarkably different—more resonant, more moving, more impactful—than simply reading it silently to yourself when you are in an ordinary state of mind. When you absorb a poem in the open, alert, highly sensitized state that meditation can induce, the words sink in more deeply, and we may experience the truth of what A. R. Ammons said, that ‘poetry is a verbal means to a non-verbal source,’ a way for language to take us beyond language, beyond thought, to something much richer and more mysterious.”
These meditations are 5, 10, or 20 minutes long and each includes John reading a poem shortly before the meditation period ends. We invite you to pause, take some time, create quiet space for reflection and, perhaps, rediscovery. As John notes in the appendix to The Poetry of Grief, Gratitude, and Reverence, “poetry helped me see.”
If you wish to hear John’s introduction on how to meditate with the poems, you can listen below.
“Those Winter Sundays,” Robert Hayden
“Song for the Turtles in the Gulf,” Linda Hogan
“Traveling through the Dark,” William Stafford
“Concurrence,” Denise Levertov
“What Meets the Eye,” Ruth Stone
“Putting in the Seed,” Robert Frost
“Morning, East Wallingford,” John Brehm
“See the Flowers,” Ranier Maria Rilke