The Dharma of Poetry: How Poems Can Deepen Your Spiritual Practice and Open You to Joy, Paperback

Discover how to engage with poetry to support your spiritual practice, leading to more mindfulness, equanimity, and 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.

About author(s):John Brehm is the author of three books of poetry, Sea of Faith, Help Is on the Way, and No Day at the Beach. His poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Sun, The Gettysburg Review, The Writer's Almanac, Plume, Best American Poetry, The Norton Introduction to Literature, and many others. He is the editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy and the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches poetry and meditation classes in Portland and in Denver, Colorado. He can be found online at johnbrehmpoet.com.