Art & Creativity Quote by John Barton

There is a restlessness in Barton’s complaint that feels less like impatience than artistic self-interrogation: the “many short poems” that “read and write like beginnings” aren’t being dismissed as minor work, but as a particular kind of seduction. They promise a world, flash a mood, open a door - then stop right at the threshold. “Whet my appetite” is telling. Appetite is bodily, not theoretical; it’s desire stirred but not fed. Barton is naming the addictive micro-pleasure of brevity, the way a short lyric can deliver a clean hit of insight or music while leaving the reader hungry for consequence, for time to accumulate meaning.

The line “read and write” folds audience and maker together. He’s not only critiquing a trend in contemporary taste (the neatly packaged poem that travels well on a page, in a workshop, in a feed), he’s implicating his own habits: the short poem is easy to start and easy to finish, which is exactly the problem. Beginnings are where writers can hide - in atmosphere, in premise, in the glamorous moment before the hard work of development.

“I want to get over that” lands with a plainspoken humility that’s sharper than it looks. It’s not a call to abandon compression; it’s a desire to move past the safety of the fragment and into poems that risk narrative, argument, or sustained emotional exposure. The subtext: Barton wants poems that don’t just spark, but stay lit.