#johnbrehm — Public Fediverse posts

John Brehm, 1955-2026

The poet John Brehm passed away on Monday, in Portland, Oregon.

John and I were friends, close friends when he lived just down the block from me, on Berkeley Place, here in Brooklyn. We’d listen to Brad Mehldau and McCoy Tyner at his place, eat lentil soup at a now-defunct Middle Eastern joint on 6th Avenue, and tomcat around town.

His poems from that period are the ones I know best, many of which are collected in his 2004 book, Sea of Faith: “When My Car Broke Down,” “If Feeling Isn’t In It,” and the title poem, “Sea of Faith.” Reading its last lines again reminds me of the John I knew:

                                                                                  ...I wished 
it was true, wished there really was a Sea of Faith
that you could wade out into,
dive under its blue and magic waters,
hold your breath, swim like a fish
down to the bottom, and then emerge again
able to believe in everything, faithful
and unafraid to ask even the simplest of questions,
happy to have them simply answered.

In “The Poems I Have Not Written,” John calls himself “wildly unprolific,” but that is just so much Brehmian self-deprecation. Poetic accomplishment isn’t measured by the bushel anyway. In John’s case, the art is in the intense focus and scrutiny he brings to particular details of a single moment in time (like the twelve raindrops hanging from the window sash in “Morning, East Wallingford”); it’s in the mix of precise observation and dreamy wonder, or the ease with which his verses follow the path of his wandering mind, or the surprise he shares with readers at finding humor even in the darkest moments.

Just This, his latest book, brings together about twenty-five years of John Brehm’s writing, and it’s a pretty good place to get to know his work. The book opens with new poems, including a whole section of haiku. I vaguely remember telling John, indelicately and as if what I had to say on the subject mattered, that haiku didn’t do much for me. He had probably forgotten, or long ago forgiven, my arrogant and oafish remarks when I wrote to him just a few weeks ago about this poem, which now rings, as it were, especially true for me:

just before dawn
my tinnitus takes over
where the crickets leave off

He plays all kinds of variations on the form.

           looking up
from looking something up -- 
                   the whole world still there.

Many of Brehm’s poems are about that interplay of self and world, the real and unrealized possibilities of a passing moment, the fleeting glimpse of some longed-for ecstasy or metamorphosis, a poet becoming fish, or becoming water, as in “Supplication at the River.”

And then I would turn away
and into something other,
as if the way the water moves,
confluence of sources, metaphor 
for everything, but essential and itself,
would be my way of moving.

This is the poetic situation, or at least the situation that shows up again and again in John Brehm’s poetry. Emotions may feel sticky, but everything’s ceaselessly in motion. The mind grasps at flickering images of what is and what could be, puts words to them, gives them form and definition; yet what’s done will easily come undone. The poems are record of the passing moment and some consolation for its passing. And things begin just at the moment when they seem to end.