Quotes from John Barton

Reading should be a repeat performance.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them.

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.

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

I find it exhausting to administer a magazine without an office or paid staff.

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

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

The experiment of the poem is mostly intuitive. I write the first draft, pulling in the various elements that interest me, in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight.

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.

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.

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

The Gospels, treated so solemnly in later Christian life and liturgy, are the distillation of traditions about Jesus, and as such were also naturally highly regarded and copied for subsequent generations, but they were not seen by the first Christians as verbally exact: there was no tradition, as there was in Judaism, of precise copying of the text Ã¢â'¬â€œ with the consequence that New Testament manuscripts vary greatly, and none is authoritative.