"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"
About this Quote
The line reads like a quiet manifesto for how poems manufacture electricity: not by declaring a single meaning, but by forcing meanings to share a room. Barton’s “intrigued” is doing strategic work. It’s modest on the surface, almost conversational, but it signals a long-term commitment to a method that prizes friction over clarity. “Seemingly unrelated” is the key hedge. The poem’s job is to prove the relation after the fact, to make coincidence feel like design.
The intent is craft-forward: Barton is describing a practice of collage and pivot, where an image doesn’t illustrate an idea so much as complicate it. That’s why he pairs “ideas or images” (abstract and sensory) and then slides to the “many, sometimes dissimilar, meanings” of a word. He’s naming two engines of poetry at once: juxtaposition (the montage cut) and polysemy (the double-take inside language). The subtext is that linear argument can’t hold what he wants to say; only association, echo, and ambiguity can.
Context matters here because Barton comes of age in a late-20th-century literary climate suspicious of grand, stable truths and increasingly attentive to how language itself shapes experience. His phrasing suggests a poet interested in the politics of interpretation: if a word carries multiple meanings, then a poem can stage competing realities without resolving them. The pleasure is not just in connection, but in the moment you realize your own mind has done the welding.
The intent is craft-forward: Barton is describing a practice of collage and pivot, where an image doesn’t illustrate an idea so much as complicate it. That’s why he pairs “ideas or images” (abstract and sensory) and then slides to the “many, sometimes dissimilar, meanings” of a word. He’s naming two engines of poetry at once: juxtaposition (the montage cut) and polysemy (the double-take inside language). The subtext is that linear argument can’t hold what he wants to say; only association, echo, and ambiguity can.
Context matters here because Barton comes of age in a late-20th-century literary climate suspicious of grand, stable truths and increasingly attentive to how language itself shapes experience. His phrasing suggests a poet interested in the politics of interpretation: if a word carries multiple meanings, then a poem can stage competing realities without resolving them. The pleasure is not just in connection, but in the moment you realize your own mind has done the welding.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by John
Add to List
