As a poet and meditator, John Brehm believes that poetry can deepen our spiritual practice.
Over the many years of teaching, he’s found a simple method of leading discussions that elicits lively engagement, leads to profound insights, and helps us live in the present moment. He begins by reading the poem aloud, or having a community member read it, so that everyone has a fresh — and shared — experience of the poem.
After allowing for some silence to let the poem resonate, he invites participants to drop the impulse to analyze and interpret, and instead enter the poem through the doorway of noticing and appreciating. Instead of focusing on what the poem “means,” or what the poet “is saying,” which tends to reduce the poem to its paraphrasable content, he asks, “What do you like about the poem? What feels lit up for you?” Anyone can notice and appreciate; it requires no literary training, which can often become an obstacle, as concepts and interpretive strategies can obscure the immediacy of our connection with a poem. John Brehm also believes that mindfulness meditation is an excellent preparation for reading and discussing poetry in this way. So if you like meditation and poetry, this list of three best mindful poetry books by John Brehm is for you.
1. The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy
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.
2. The Dharma of Poetry: How Poems Can Deepen Your Spiritual Practice and Open You to Joy
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.
3. Dharma Talk: Poems
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.
These three best John Brehm mindful poetry books are excellent and necessary in their entirety. Complement with Billy Collins’ introduction to mindful poetry and then revisit Emily Dickinson and Bill Murray on how to read a poem.
I’m a freelance writer and mindfulness advocate behind this blog. What you see here is the combination of my three favorite things: reading, writing, and mindfulness. While you’re here, subscribe to my blog updates and gain access to free mindfulness resources for stress relief.
