This is Not a Guidebook

John Brehm reflects on his latest poetry collection, Dharma Talk

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing my dear friend-mentor John Brehm about the process behind his fourth full-length collection, Dharma Talk.

John Brehm was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska and educated at the University of Nebraska and Cornell University. He is the author of four full-length books of poetry, Sea of Faith, Help Is on the Way, No Day at the Beach, Dharma Talk, and a chapbook, The Way Water Moves. His collection of essays, The Dharma of Poetry, was published by Wisdom Publications and is a companion to his acclaimed anthology, The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, also from Wisdom Publications. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Sun, The Southern Review, Plume, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Best American Poetry, The Norton Introduction to Literature, and many other journals and anthologies.

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read the interview. To hear John read poems from Dharma Talk, check out the video (I recommend it!).

This is Not a Guidebook

Radha Marcum: I’d love to start with a question about the book's title, Dharma Talk. To me, it suggests both the seriousness and the humor in your work. How did you arrive at that title?

John Brehm: Yeah, well, there's an interesting story behind it. Initially, I wasn't sure what to call the book. A friend suggested "In the Thick of It," which is a line from one of the poems. So, that was the title for a long time. However, my editor at Wisdom wasn't crazy about it. Since the book is being published by a Buddhist press, I thought a more obviously Buddhist title would be better.

There's a poem in the book called "Dharma Talk," which felt appropriate because it points to a dharma talk, which many of your listeners probably know is the Buddhist version of a sermon, though much more informal. It's a talk given by the dharma teacher to a gathering of meditators, usually after a period of meditation.

I also wanted to capture a playful quality, like "dharma talk" in the sense of shop talk or small talk. The poems are very conversational, relaxed in diction and rhythm. They’re quite talkative, and I wanted to convey that as well.

But I know you said you found the title humorous. Was it the implication of shop talk or small talk that you found funny? I'm curious about that.

Radha: I think you hit the nail on the head. There's that sense of “talk” as something given in the mode of a sermon or serious life instruction. But then there's also the idea that talk is just talk. This is central to poetry—bridging natural, everyday speech and other modes of relating through language while elevating it. A poem is a tool by which we can re-enter our lives.

John: Many of the poems are about not speaking—they're about silence and emptiness. For instance, there's a poem called "Something and Nothing" that begins with, "There's something to be said for having nothing to say." 

In "Dharma Talk," I also play with the idea of emptiness and not speaking, the via negativa—the negative way of silence and approaching the sacred by saying what it is not, rather than making positive assertions, like the way the Tao Te Ching begins, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao." So, there's that dimension to the title as well.

Radha: Can you say more about the purpose of the working title and what it gave you during the process? At what point did you know you had the final title?

John: “In the Thick of It” is from the poem "Metta." I remember when my last book was published, a friend of mine who blurbed it, mentioned the compassionate nature of the poems. He said that the poems were strongly compassionate, and that was a foreground feature of the work. I remember thinking, "Is that really true? I'm not so sure." So, I wrote the poem "Metta" partly to express this empathic resonance and a compassionate way of witnessing the suffering of others.

"In the thick of it" comes from that poem, and I wanted to highlight the quality of being in the thick of suffering, the messiness of life, and the compassionate response to it. While it helped me consider a more dharma-oriented book, since Wisdom is a Buddhist publisher, it was an organizing principle. I imagined the audience as primarily other Buddhist practitioners, meditators, or people drawn to the spiritual dimension of poetry from a Buddhist perspective.

This orientation helped me see which poems aligned with that view and which didn't. It was helpful not only in writing the poems but also in organizing the book and deciding what to include and what to leave out.

Radha: In the poems, I so admire your ability to take us into the mind of the speaker, to be honest about what's going on in there. You bring us to moments of genuine connection with the world. It seems like the central task of poetry is to remind us of this connectedness.

The book centers on Buddhist concepts like compassion, emptiness, and non-separation, as well as universal themes like aging. Were you deliberate about working toward those themes and ideas, or did they emerge in the process of writing the individual poems?

John: Yeah, I never sit down to write with a theme in mind. It's more an experience or an idea like "Dharma Talk" that guides me. A line will come to me and take me in a certain direction. So I don't write with a theme in mind, but I'm reading and practicing, and these themes of compassion, emptiness, non-separation, loving-kindness, and aging are things that run through my life.

If I'm writing about my life, I'm writing about those things because they are most prominent in my day-to-day experience. It's deliberate in the larger sense that these themes guide my life, so naturally, they show up in my poems. When organizing the book, I became more aware of recurring themes like emptiness.

Danusha Laméris, who wrote a blurb, said in a longer version that didn't make it onto the jacket, "Think of this as a guidebook to emptiness." That seems like an appropriate way to think about the book. Emptiness certainly runs through it.

As for aging, I'm 68, though I was younger when I wrote some of these poems. There's one on turning 64 that's just a six-word poem: "The slowing down is speeding up." I have some health issues and chronic illness, and I like to tell people that I'm 68, but I don't feel a day over 80. Aging is a big part of my experience, so I write about that.

Radha: Say more about this idea of a book of poems as a guidebook.

John: When I first got the blurb, I thought, "Guidebook?" But I'm always that way. Almost any time someone writes a blurb for me, I initially resist it. Then I come to see, "Oh, it's perfect." But yeah, I don't think of the book as a guidebook. I'm not even sure how to conceptualize that as a book of poems, except in the sense that poetry can help us live our lives, which I really believe.

In fact, I remember there was a period when poets often said in their blurbs, "This book helps me to live my life." When I first read that, I thought, "Is that true? Is that really true?" It seemed hyperbolic. But then I thought, "Well, if that is true, how would it be true?" I wrote a book of essays, The Dharma of Poetry, based on the concept of how poems can help us live our lives.

I came up with the idea that poems can be exemplary. They're not necessarily pedagogical, but they give us examples of ways of thinking, feeling, qualities of awareness, and responsiveness to life that we might adopt as our own. In that sense, I think poems can help us live our lives.

Emptiness is one of those tricky Buddhist concepts. It's very hard to explain, but it’s a very positive concept. It doesn't have the Western connotations of nothingness, voidness, or the abyss. It's more like the Tao, which is empty itself but is the generative tissue that underlies all things. That's not quite the right way to say it either, but it intrigued me to keep coming back to it and to think about the negative space or what’s not said, or where language takes you when it can go no further.

Radha: We could probably spend the rest of our time just unpacking that concept of emptiness and how it relates to poetry, because there's such an interesting correlation between the forms of poetry and, as you said, that way of looking at the world. It’s hard to articulate, but we feel it in the poems.

So, I'm curious, if I could take that question further: how has poetry helped you live your life?

John: Oh, that's a great question. But before I get to that, I just wanted to say that another thing about poetry and emptiness is that our lives are very crowded. There's too much noise, too much of everything, and our minds are crowded. Poetry can drop us into this spaciousness and openness, where things are not so crowded and the mind can slow down and experience a kind of calm and spaciousness that is very refreshing.

There's a lot of space around the short poems in my book. The book itself is quite small—physically small and not very long. I wanted to write a book about which no one could say, "Well, it's all right, but it could be shorter." I'm reading Kevin Young's latest book, which is 200 pages, and he's a great poet, but wow.

How has poetry helped me live my life? I think it has helped me learn how to pay attention to the world, how to see things rather than just judge all the time. It teaches me to stop, look, and respond to the world. The poems I love most have a kind of warmth and responsiveness to life, to daily life and ordinary experience, finding richness and magic in unexpected places.

Poetry has helped me learn how to look and how to be in the world in a way that feels more open-hearted, responsive, and attentive. These qualities are quite valuable. My mind, like everyone's, falls back into habitual patterns of relentless thinking and judging, much of which is completely worthless, just loops of thoughts repeated thousands of times.

In the poem "Metta," I'm trying to wish people well, safe, and happy, but I'm also like, "Could you do this also?" It's hard to let go of that. But I think great poems, or good poems, can help us be more generous, kind, and open.

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To hear more of John’s book insights and reflections on major influences, such as A.R. Ammons, plus sample a few poems from the book, watch/listen to the full interview here.

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