John Barton Quotes on Poetry (11 Quotes)

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

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

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

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

Because the title poem is about one man's response to being infected with HIV, I can understand why readers would focus the book around the pandemic.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.