Life & Wisdom Quote by John Barton

The brag here is carefully disguised as a bruise. Barton opens with bureaucratic distance - "I have been told" - as if he’s merely relaying office gossip, not polishing a credential. That passive construction does two jobs at once: it protects him from sounding vain while still letting the prestige land. Someone important ("a member of the board") at a magazine you’re meant to recognize ("one of Canada's most prominent") has, apparently, validated the seriousness of his work by reacting badly to it.

The key word is "controversy", a term that flatters the writer even when it condemns the writing. In literary culture, outrage is often a backhanded form of consecration: your piece mattered enough to be argued over. Barton’s syntax keeps the actual content offstage - we never learn what the submission said, who objected, or why. That omission is the subtext. The story isn’t about the text; it’s about the apparatus around the text: boards, gatekeepers, reputations, and the petty weather systems that decide what gets published.

As a poet, Barton is also pointing to a Canadian context where literary institutions can feel both intimate and risk-averse, with influence concentrated in small circles. The line reads like a quiet indictment of that ecosystem, but it’s also a self-portrait: an artist measuring his impact through institutional recoil. The controversy becomes proof of life, and the magazine’s discomfort becomes part of the poem’s afterlife.