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"Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them."
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"I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy."
"The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue."
"I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try."
"By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow."
"Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems."
"Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems."
"Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel."
"On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world."
"I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places."
Explore more quotes by John Barton
"An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive."
"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."
"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."
"The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality."
"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 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."
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