#john brehm

[unkown || rookies, heated rivalry || || the old shepherd's chief mourner (1837), edwin kandseer || rose, heated rivalry || how to be a dog, andrew kane || dogperson iii, dusty ray || a chained hound eating from a bowl, jan fyt || dinosaur, richard siken || olympians, heated rivalry || more and more, margaret atwood || hounds with dead stag, a hare and other game, in a landscape, david de coninck || sofie, james van fossen || rose, heated rivalry || if feeling isn't in it, john brehm || kuvasz dog wearing a protective collar against wolves || you are so warm, rae klein || i'll believe in anything, heated rivalry || how to be a dod, andrew kane || i'll believe in anything, heated rivalry || the bread we eat in dreams, catherynne m. valente || loyalty, briton riviere (use inspired by @dogsdayilya) || the cottage, heated rivalry || gnaw at the heartbeat, wenyi xue || the cottage, heated rivalry || putting the dog to sleep, the antlers || the odyssey homer (translator's note), translated by emily wilson]

— John Brehm, from The Dharma of Poetry: How Poems Can Deepen Your Spiritual Practice and Open You to Joy (Wisdom Publications, 2021)

— John Brehm, "Second Helpings" in Poetry Magazine, August 1999 (Poetry Foundation) (via Read A Little Poetry)

— John Brehm, If Feeling Isn't In It

— John Brehm, The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy

Thank you for your letter informing me of the errors in my 2005 filing. I’m enclosing a check for $5,657.00 to cover the tax which I evidently still owe and the interest on that tax. I would hereby like to ask, however, that you forgive the penalty of $1,136.00 since the employer failed to send me a 1099 for the income I made as a consultant that year. Of course I realize it’s my responsibility to report all my income, but in the absence of a 1099 I simply forgot. I have a number of clients and I’m (obviously) not the best bookkeeper. Nor am I particularly “good with money.” I am a poet as well as a freelance writer, and being a poet isn’t quite as lucrative as you might imagine. You may notice, for example, that for all of last year I received $57.00 in royalties. (A friend of mine helpfully observed that I could have made more money “as a parking meter,” to which I replied that I could have made a lot more money as a parking meter, and gotten a lot more respect as well.) Unlike most hard-working poets in America, I don’t teach, mainly because I don’t know anything. I’m probably not all that far from the clichéd notion of the romantic poet you yourself may hold. I get stoned sometimes and stare at trees and clouds for hours on end, try to see the wind, etc. I weep for no reason, remember real or imagined slights for ages, and lick my wounds with words. I live in a studio apartment, a garret if you will. I have a huge desk—it’s like the deck of a ship, and I its landlocked captain, gazing out to sea. It sits underneath my sleeping loft, which my girlfriend likes to call “the lofty loft,” for reasons I won’t go into here as they may seem inappropriate, or too personal, or perhaps irrelevant to my purpose, which is to ask your forgiveness of the penalty and to offer reasons why by explaining the hardships of the poet’s life. I’ll just say that sometimes it gets pretty lofty up there and sometimes we imagine we’re on a magic carpet drifting smoothly above the city below, in its state of semi-controlled, slow-motion collapse, and on out over the ocean, which she loves and fears, just like I do, or over the summer-campy Catskills, where we can’t afford to buy a country house, with their worn-down mountains and charmingly self-effacing trees, so unlike the impossibly massive and overly serious cedars and hemlocks and Douglass fir trees of the Pacific Northwest, where I used to live until poverty forced me East. Those trees are brooders—dignified, mist-shrouded monsters—beautiful, of course, and awe-inspiring (I wonder if you have felt this), but too damply archaic and imposing and uncomprehendable for my taste. I like a tree you can take in with a single steady gaze. I wonder if you are as bad at poetry as I am at accounting. Perhaps we are the inverted mirror-images of each other. I don’t imagine you get asked that question very often or receive many letters like this one. Maybe you’re reading this out loud even now to your office (I almost said “cell”) mates. Of my book a reviewer once said that “one simply can’t resist reading these poems out loud to someone else,” and I wonder if you feel this—the irresistible need to read this poem aloud. I’m sure the letters you receive are mostly angry ones, the kind that say things like, “Here, take my Goddamn money and buy Dick Cheney a few more gallons of puppy blood for his nightly ablutions,” or “Dear IRS, please use the enclosed check to purchase some hand-held rocket-launchers to blast the fuck out of some poor Iraqi’s house, which you prefer to call ‘a suspected insurgent stronghold.’” Or, “Please give this money to the CEO of Exxon so he can buy silk socks while I regurgitate my supper and try not to starve.” I thought of taking that approach, I felt that desire to get in a shot or two, to give voice to righteous indignation, treat you like a non-person, someone mindlessly and heartlessly saying “no” all day long. But I’m done with all that, I want to reach you, to speak to you as a fellow human being immersed in the same joys and suffering as I am—didn’t you once write poems yourself, poems of anguish and loss and loneliness?—and to remind you of the karmic delights of forgiveness that await you if you release me from this debt.

world came right through.