Parenting & Family Quote by John Barton

Nostalgia isn’t doing the heavy lifting here; logistics are. Barton frames the loosening of a “community of poets” as less a romantic falling-out than an ordinary attrition problem: time, labor, caregiving. That choice matters. By pinning the distance on “jobs, children, and the like,” he punctures the old fantasy that artistic circles dissolve because of egos, feuds, or aesthetic betrayal. The subtext is quietly political: poetry communities don’t vanish in a blaze, they get outcompeted by schedules and rent.

The phrasing is deliberately mild. “Not as close as it used to be” avoids melodrama, and “if only for the fact” signals restraint, as if he’s refusing to accuse anyone of neglect. Yet the list is telling. “Jobs” comes first, then “children,” mapping adulthood’s twin claims: economic survival and responsibility. “And the like” widens the net to elder care, illness, burnout, the bureaucratic sprawl that crowds out the unpaid work of staying in touch. It’s a small, human sentence that implies a bigger reality: art scenes depend on disposable time, and disposable time is a privilege that narrows as people age.

Contextually, it reads like a mid-career inventory from someone watching the informal infrastructures of literary life - readings, workshops, late-night arguments, mutual editing - thin out. The intent isn’t to scold; it’s to register a cultural shift from bohemian density to dispersed adulthood. The quiet ache is that community doesn’t die; it gets postponed indefinitely.