John Barton

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.

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.

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.

Who is the ideal reader? God only knows.

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.

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.

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

I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.

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.

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.

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

A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.

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

I became intrigued with colour theory. The absurd pronouncements of the Colour Institute, a group that decides what colours are hot each year or season, amused me.

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.

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

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

Reading should be a repeat performance.

Some readers allow their prejudices to blind them. A good reader knows how to disregard inappropriate responses.

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

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 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.

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.

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