Quotes from John Barton

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.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.

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.

The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality.

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

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 feel very connected to poets across the country.

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.

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.

In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.

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.

No poem is easily grasped so why should any reader expect fast results?

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.

Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem.

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

The essence of a religious approach to the world, it seems to me, is to be found, not in the imposition of theological dogma, but in the recognition of what is actually there.

The thirty-first of October 1517, when Martin Luther is said to have posted his ninety-five theses against indulgences on the door of the Castle Church in the small town of Wittenberg in Saxony

The history will necessarily include a great deal of pre-history, as I explain how biblical books were composed, since few if any are the result of simple composition by one author: most are highly composite, and some even depend on others, so that there is a process of reception of older books going on in younger ones.

The history of the Bible is thus the story of the interplay between the religion and the book Ã¢â'¬â€œ neither mapping exactly onto the other.

There are versions of Christianity that claim to be simply 'biblical' (no versions of Judaism do so), but the reality is that the structures and content of Christian belief, even among Christians who believe their faith to be wholly grounded in the Bible, are organized and articulated differently from the contents of the Bible.

The description of the Bible (warts and all) which follows will necessarily make disconcerting reading for those who idealize it, but I will also show that it is not and cannot be the whole foundation of either Judaism or Christianity.