No Day at the Beach
No Day At The Beach, by John Brehm. University of Wisconsin Poetry Series, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2020. 76 pp. $16.95 (paperback)
John Brehm’s pilgrimage began in Nebraska and took him to Brooklyn. There he honed a rather sharp edge which now, as he seeks illumination in Portland, Oregon, he sometimes deprecates as an obstacle to compassion for other people. He teaches in literary institutions, free of university affiliation, which offer an endless flow of courses, workshops, readings, and book parties where those who seek enlightenment through poetry or poetry through enlightenment make common cause. His well-received anthology, The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy sounds crafted for this niche. More than a niche—if the internet can be trusted, these are burgeoning institutions.
Brehm relates the self-deprecation to the enlightenment project, telling an interviewer: “In many of the poems, my intention is to shine a light on the pathos, delusions and absurdity of the egoic mind. Thus, the self-deprecating humor.” Readers notice it, but it isn’t self-laceration; it just feels like modesty, clarity, compassion for self; though not without a little sting like a vaccination shot. "Here: An Epithalamion," Brehm’s celebration of his recent first marriage, begins with a daunting summary of strike-outs, and rejections, before rising gently to an elegant, sure-footed dance, avoiding inflated claims while fixing the uniqueness of a particular moment in a garden.
“Blathery Performance” (p. 33), three pages and with longer lines than the “skinny poems” Brehm now prefers, is a major confrontation with the “egoic mind.” But if that sounds Wagnerian, think Schubert—personal, smart, sincere, poignant, entertaining with wit and anecdote, yet focused on the Protean adversary. The poem begins with regret for the ego’s selfish actions—“…jumping on every opportunity/ To say something funny, however hurtful…” A talk with a friend provides evidence for this self-indictment. Candidly, Brehm reveals how much of his conversation unloads pre-used material: “Then I launched into my spiel about MFA programs…”; “I trotted out my anecdote about…”
We all do this and notice it in others, but to frame it, plausibly I think, as shining a light on “the pathos, delusions and absurdity of the egoic mind,” gives it a dimension missing from self satire. “Holding up my meanness as if it were wisdom.” (Been there.) Then, like a sonata, the poem turns and having developed the opening theme introduces a new theme—as he begins a course combining poetry and spiritual practice, shouldn’t he be exemplifying that happy marriage in himself? Leading to a reconciliation of the two themes: “…in describing/confessing/ my obsessive, relentless self-concern,/ I am further promoting an image of myself/ …and so on and so forth down the infinite/ hall of mirrors that is the ego…”
Brehm knows how to provide the tension poems die for lack of by making the chess match with the ego an ongoing drama. He sometimes alludes to a temper expressed as impatience with others. The origins of this temper, the struggle to contain it, add movement and action. In "Dick’s Kitchen Metaphysical," Brehm is reading about attaining higher levels of consciousness, indeed higher worlds, when the waitress’s grammatical mistake sends him “plummeting back into the lower worlds…” and not for the first time—he flashes on past moments when he has vented his spleen inwardly on his fellow humans, “barking at them in my head…” Not just an ironic Portlandia vignette: the poet pursuing wisdom over a turkey burger and yam “not fries” knocked off his cloud by a gum chewing waitress; he has an epiphanic vision of how the better angels of his nature are oppressed by that temper. I have often thought that many poets, equipped with the necessary skills, falter by trying to present themselves as wise or noble. They don’t do this out of vanity, just from a sense of how poems should sound. Those who write as though watching Maya the veil of illusion recede through a rearview mirror may be spinning their wheels. Today’s gains must be re-taken tomorrow.
I admire these poems. The “skinny poem” form suits their tumbling, downhill movement. He gets so much into them—ideas and emotions that take flight, but end up back in Kansas like Dorothy. Or as he closes "Back Then": “…the last line/ of a poem will sometimes/ look back, wistfully,/ at the first. “(p. 3) Tucked into another piece, "Swifts," is a definition of poems. Watching an annual Portland event—the largest known roost of migrating Vaux Swifts in the world—Brehm is amazed that they don’t collide—“…until/ you see them as they truly are:/ a single organism, a body made mostly/ of air and quick decisions, jagged/ motions that gradually cohere—/a poem in other words.” (p. 6) An original, useful, provocative and poetic definition of poems—not something I run across every day. Coincidentally, many of his poems fit this schema.
I know little of Buddhism, feeling that encouragement to detach is the last thing I need. If I say this to seekers on the path, they frown (would it be worth the trouble to correct my misconception?). In China, Buddhism seemed more like the Roman Catholic Church; one of Da Chen’s memoirs tells how his mother paid the priest to pray for high scores on Da Chen’s exams. The austere, philosophical/psychological realm of U.S. Buddhism once proclaimed a separation from the noisy, selfish, materialist world of malls, TV, and mass shootings. Brehm, to me, represents a more accessible American Buddhism I associate with George Saunders’s Lincoln at the Bardo. That remarkable novel seemed to accept—without soft-pedaling—American life and show, to Americans, the compassion which Buddhism preaches. Brehm’s Buddhism, less solemn, less hierophantic than earlier versions—W.S. Merwin?—belongs here.
I suppose this poetry has limitations: lack of rhetorical splendor, as if the egoic mind is sulking, refusing to set off its fireworks—“pathos, delusions, absurdity? OK smart guy! See how well you get along without me.” But nuns fret not in their prison cell, and Brehm has fashioned his poems the way he wants. They seem to look us in the eye—light as a feather, solid as a rock.
—Reviewer Lem Coley is retired from Nassau Community College and teaches part-time at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is a long-time contributor of reviews to TMR.