Art & Creativity Quote by John Barton

Barton is quietly dismantling the fantasy of the poet as a mystic who receives finished wisdom on a lightning bolt. He calls the poem an "experiment", then undercuts any lab-coat certainty with "mostly intuitive", a pairing that captures how contemporary poetry often operates: half method, half gut, accountable to neither pure inspiration nor strict procedure. The line admits that the real work happens before meaning does. Drafting is not transcription; it's test-running a mind.

The most revealing phrase is "pulling in the various elements that interest me". Interest, not argument, is the engine. That’s a choice with stakes: it frames attention as an ethical and aesthetic compass in an era where attention is monetized and fragmented. Barton suggests the poem begins as a collage of attractions - images, sounds, bits of memory, cultural debris - and only later discovers what it knows. The subtext is permission-giving. You don't need a thesis to start; you need a charged set of materials.

Then comes the modest, almost anxious clause: "in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight". Hope is doing a lot of work. Barton positions insight as emergent, not imposed, something generated by juxtaposition and pressure rather than declared from on high. "Some kind" is deliberately non-grandiose, resisting the demand that art deliver clean lessons. Contextually, this sits in a post-confessional, post-postmodern landscape where poets are wary of both didactic certainty and empty cleverness. The poem, for Barton, is a place where meaning has to be earned by arrangement.