Words matter. These are the best John Barton Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.
Poets can’t resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.
The reader’s challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.
The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality.
I have become intrigued with the combining of seemingly unrelated ideas or images, or the drawing upon the many, sometimes dissimilar, meanings a word might have.
Poets have to be sensitive to their audience, but it does not mean that they censor themselves. I realise my audience is diverse. Some will read with empathy and curiosity while others will take offense.
Some readers allow their prejudices to blind them. A good reader knows how to disregard inappropriate responses.
In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance.
I have been told by a member of the board of one of Canada’s most prominent literary magazines that a submission of mine once caused a great deal of controversy.
The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.
I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
I find it exhausting to administer a magazine without an office or paid staff.
The point of an experiment is not to arrive at a predetermined end point, to prove or disprove anything, but to deliver a poem that reveals much about the process taken.
We are comfortable with the fact that we cannot know personally what happened in the world before we were born, yet we are uncomfortable with the notion that we will stop engaging with time at some point in the future.
Reading should be a repeat performance.
If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.
I have always been very obsessed with time. Time’s passage makes us all very vulnerable and because we all experience it in our own way, it can make us feel very alone.
