Time & Perspective Quote by John Barton

Time is Barton’s engine and his trap: a subject so totalizing it resists the tidy “theme” label. The opening move is disarmingly modest - he “can’t summarize it” - but the subtext is a poet’s credo. Time isn’t an idea he decorates with metaphors; it’s the pressure system that determines what his poems can notice and how they breathe.

The quote works because it stages time as a contradiction we live inside, not a philosophical abstraction. “We want time to pass” carries the itch of anticipation, the consumer’s appetite for novelty, the private hope that the next hour will redeem the last. Then Barton flips it: “we want to hold on to certain moments,” the reflex that builds scrapbooks, love songs, and elegies. Poetry, for him, sits right between those desires - a technology of keeping that never quite stops the losing.

The final clause, blunt as a door closing, names what all the earlier wants have been circling: “we don’t want our lives to end.” He’s not being melodramatic; he’s exposing the hidden bargain beneath everyday wish-making. Time is what makes narrative possible - “new things” happen - and what makes every narrative tragic - it runs out.

Contextually, Barton’s stance feels in conversation with contemporary lyric’s obsession with memory, aging, and the body: poems as timestamped evidence, trying to turn experience into something that can outlast the experiencer. The intent isn’t to solve time, but to keep faith with its ache.