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"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."
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"If a moneyed man had a "corny mind, a flatterer would immediately start chasing him like a hungry hen!"
"An honest government is the childish dream of the gullible men!"
"A country where women are not free has no chance ever to be something good and respectable!"
"It is better to go near the truth and be imprisoned than to stay with the wrong and roam about freely, master Galilei. In fact, getting attached to falsity is terrible slavery, and real freedom is only next to the right."
"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
"Foulmouthed individuals seem to have their neuron systems replaced by colon structures, given that their terminology profusely consists of "sh*t and f*ck". ['Tolerance zero']"
"The walls, where there was room, were well decorated with calendars and posters showing bright, improbable girls with pumped-up breasts and no hips - blondes, brunettes and redheads, but always with this bust development, so that a visitor of another species might judge from the preoccupation of artist and audience that the seat of procreation lay in the mammaries. Alice Chicoy...who worked among the shining girls, was wide-hipped and sag-chested and she walked well back on her heels...She was not in the least jealous of the calendar girls and the Coca-Cola girls. She had never seen anyone like them, and she didn't think anyone ever had."
Explore more quotes by John Barton
"Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools."
"To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that."
"The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions."
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