John Barton quotes:

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.

Who is the ideal reader? God only knows.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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