John Barton Quotes

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

I've hated poetry ever since I was at school. I include Shakespeare in that. I don't understand the obsession with him!

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

I read mostly poetry.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

I'm not a pop song lyric writer. I can't just focus on one simple meaning or even a double entendre.