Success Quote by John Barton

Failure, for Barton, isn’t a verdict; it’s a draft with unfinished business. The verb “tinker” is doing sly work here. It’s casual, almost mechanical, more garage than garret, shrinking the myth of poetic thunderbolt down to patient handwork. That choice of diction quietly argues that poems aren’t sacred transmissions so much as objects you can reopen, tighten, rewire. Craft replaces inspiration as the governing ethic.

The emotional engine sits in “failed” and “sent aside,” then immediately resists the finality those words pretend to offer. Barton admits to triage - some poems don’t make it - but he also exposes how a poet’s sense of value isn’t identical to the marketplace’s or the workshop’s. “Even years afterward” stretches time into part of the compositional process, suggesting that distance can be an editing tool: you return with a different mind, a different life, a different set of obsessions. What once read as a dead end may become a door.

The key line is “something about them that I cannot give up on.” That “something” stays unnamed, which is the point. It’s the poem’s residue: an image that won’t stop flashing, a rhythm that keeps tapping, a truth you weren’t ready to say cleanly. Subtextually, Barton is defending persistence without romanticizing it. He’s also admitting attachment - the poem that “fails” can still contain the seed of the poem you’re meant to write later. In an era that rewards constant output, this is a quiet argument for returning, revising, and refusing the tyranny of the first verdict.