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"The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions."
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"We are the mountains we must cross."

"The greater your destiny the greater your troubles."

"The more difficult a problem is, the more discoveries you make in the process of resolving it."

"The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests."

"If it doesn't challenge you, it won't change you!"

"It's a challenge between me and the hurdle, and the hurdle has always won."

"There was a special challenge in describing the awful childhood of a person who happens to be my own husband. It was very painful at times, for both of us."

"I challenge myself everywhere, onstage, on the golf course. Hey, isn't that the point of it all? To keep getting better? Otherwise why do it?"
Explore more quotes by John Barton

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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