no return

As with Heraclitus’ famous remark, ‘You cannot enter the same poem twice’.

first door

When a poet has had a long career, like Philip Levine’s, it seems to matter what book/door you first entered. For me, when it comes to Levine, it’s The Names of the Lost.

diorama poem

The poem as diorama: a miniature curated space that you can peer into and into which you can pretend for a while to dwell.

boundary-dissolving moment

…to fully experience a boundary-dissolving moment in a poem, we must first dissolve the boundary that separates us from the poem itself. When we analyze and interpret a poem, when we put all our energies into “figuring it out,” we separate ourselves from it. The poem becomes an object of study, a problem to be solved. Analyzing/interpreting poems has its place and its value, but reading this way keeps us at a distance. In a mindful or spiritual reading, what we want is to enter the poem, to live in the field of its imaginative energy for a time, to appreciate and experience it rather than think about it.

—John Brehm, The Dharma of Poetry (Wisdom Publications, 2021)