The Poet Laureate Podcast

Episode Three
Guest: John Barton
Host: Kyeren Regehr

[Intro Reading]
Peas and carrots I shall while he scrubs, peels, and dices love—a shell.
 We peel, curl inside, loneliness a shell hulling us from within.
 What’s boiled is found to taste better with butter.
 The boiling point reached, makeup.
 Sex goes buttery.
 I wash the plates before he starts to clean up.
 Should we shower apart?

We don’t feel clean. In pots on the boil, bugs rise to the top.
 Orange not boiling. Dry with green on the stove top.
 Mixed singularities served with every meal—love and loneliness—
 Spooning our usual meal. So usual, a side dish,
 With heat going soft, fridge-cold, not restoring—
 Crunch to softness, I shall while he scrubs. Peels. And dices.

[Opening]
Welcome to The Poet Laureate Podcast, a luminous sanctuary for poetry and reflection.
I am Kyeren Regehr, and Episode Three is supported by The Malahat Review, a cornerstone of Canadian letters since 1967. Published quarterly by the University of Victoria, The Malahat Review showcases exceptional contemporary literary writing from Canada and beyond. Explore more at malahatreview.ca.

We just heard Peas and Carrots by John Barton, fifth Poet Laureate of Victoria, BC.
Welcome, John, and thank you for being here.

Kyeren:
That poem just now arrived in our ears for the first time. Where did it begin for you?

John Barton:
It’s based on a very brief dream I had of two friends making a meal—peas and carrots. A therapist interpreted the dream for me: each vegetable was distinct, but when they merged, they represented the merged relationship. I had the dream back in the mid-eighties and wrote the poem’s first draft about five years ago.

The form is a duplex. I used the form’s devices to tease out the meanings. When I say “mixed singularities,” I’m referring to what the therapist said—peas and carrots, each singular, combined.

On Formal Constraint

Kyeren:
You've engaged deeply with formal constraint—not only through traditional forms like the sonnet and cento, but also through remixes: rewriting a poem by rearranging its words. What draws you to this kind of formal rigor?

John:
Form forces me outside my comfort zone. With a sonnet, I can’t just write what flows spontaneously. I have to reshape it to fit rhyme, meter, syllable count. That process makes me consider alternate ways of expressing something. It’s a deeper engagement with language—it makes me revisit and rethink. And that ultimately makes me more flexible as a writer.

Even though form seems limiting, I find it expansive. The constraints open imaginative freedom. It's not that you can't go deep in free verse—but form gives me an incentive to look from more angles.

Kyeren:
So form leads you toward surprise and refinement?

John:
Exactly. Like choosing between “bright” and “luminous”—both valid, but with different resonances. Form helps me choose more precisely, often unexpectedly. It helps make things sound natural, despite the effort behind the scenes. That’s the goal—to hide the scaffolding. It’s a kind of literary stealth.

On the Evolution of Voice

Kyeren:
You’ve published over 20 books of poetry and essays, and hundreds of sonnets. Might we see your work as a kind of long home for your life? How do earlier selves remain or vanish in later collections?

John:
A good example is my Emily Carr book. I wrote it between 21 and 27—it feels long ago, but it’s stayed current. It's gone through three editions. I’ve described Emily Carr as my drag identity. An academic even analyzed it that way.

I didn’t come out publicly until later. Two books emerged almost together: Great Men, openly queer, and Notes Toward a Family Tree, which I call my fond farewell to heterosexuality. I felt awkward that Notes came out second. I even wrote an afterword to explain it. Back in 1993, terms like “gender fluid” weren’t in circulation.

On Influence and Memory

Kyeren:
Your forthcoming collection Compulsory Figures weaves personal memory, queer lineage, and larger histories. What did you discover about influence—its intimacy and distance—while writing it?

John:
The book began after a series of family deaths. The title poem is about my sister, who died ten years ago. I didn’t realize how close we were until after she was gone. My mother had died just seven months earlier.

These experiences weren’t “haunting” exactly—but they cast shadows. They shape us. The collection evolved to explore family, patriarchy, settler colonialism. It ends with poems on queerness and community—mentorship, influence, writers who mattered to me.

The first queer book I encountered was Cabaret, based on Isherwood’s novels. I saw it at 16, with my parents. That green fingernail wave at the end changed my life. That’s in the book too.

On Editing and Mentorship

Kyeren:
As an editor at The Malahat Review, and as a mentor, you’ve shaped Canadian poetry. How has editing influenced your own writing?

John:
It’s shown me what’s needed to make a poem accessible. I often think the first measure of success is whether a reader makes it to the end. That’s true of reading submissions, too. If I finish reading, something’s working.

So I try to think about carrying the reader forward—what keeps them curious. It’s like reading a mystery: you want both satisfaction and surprise. As a writer, reading so much work affects how I hope my own poems are read.

[Poetry Reading – “In Eggs and Love”]

Kyeren:
Would you read us another poem?

John:
Of course. This is a remix, made entirely from the words of Frank O’Hara’s For Grace, After a Party.

Original by Frank O’Hara:
...Isn’t it odd for in rooms full of strangers, my most tender feelings...

My poem:
In Eggs and Love
With apologies to Frank O’Hara

Who enters rooms while screaming
 A tirade, someone says, set against
 The grace of tender strangers
 Feeling put out when the ashtray isn’t full
 And the party of fire. I.
 After you holding my hand there
 For the weather the last of the spring,
 An odd blazing, that room was warm.
 You beside me in bed and wouldn’t you know
 Your love is different, isn’t it always
 For someone? Do most feelings arrive suddenly?
 Are they scrambled, warm, and right there
 For they just RA little air?
 Doesn’t interest me today.
 I like fruit and my eggs plain
 Am not what I was
 And you bear it.

On the Remix Form

Kyeren:
This form you call “remix”—what inspired it?

John:
Many years ago, the poet Helen Humphreys told me she’d rearranged an Elizabeth Bishop poem. That idea stuck with me for 20 years. In 2011, I tried it with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem.

Since then, I’ve gotten stricter. Now I even limit myself to the same punctuation as the original. It’s rigorous, but I like the challenge. And I keep refining—last night I changed a line, even though the poem was published earlier this year.

On Being a “Gay CanLit Icon”

Kyeren:
Kirby called you a “gay CanLit icon” in a review of We Are Not Avatars. What does it mean to have occupied that space throughout your career? Has the queer poetry landscape shifted? Has your voice changed within it?

John:
The first openly queer poem I wrote was in 1979—out of loneliness. Queerness had been decriminalized in Canada a decade earlier, but protections didn’t exist. I felt very alone. When I started publishing, I didn’t know of others doing the same.

Now there’s a thriving community. Bill Bissett and I co-edited Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets—57 poets, published in 2007. The majority of the work in it was from after 1990. That’s telling.

We hoped for more diversity then—Indigenous and BIPOC poets—but it was hard to find them. Today that’s changed. But so have the questions: should we still be organizing by gender identity in anthologies? Should it be more inclusive? The literary marketplace has changed too.

Kyeren:
And yet queer-specific support structures are still lacking?

John:
Yes. The Canada Council still doesn’t have specialized funding for LGBTQ writers. When they updated their equity model, they referenced an outdated legal framework that didn’t even include queer identities. There’s still an assumption that “everything’s fine” for queer writers. But that’s not the case.

[Closing]
John, thank you—for your candour, your presence, your poems, and your voice during Pride Month. I’d also like to thank The Malahat Review for supporting this episode. The Review has been a vital space for literary excellence for nearly six decades. You can support them by subscribing at malahatreview.ca.

John Barton’s full literary biography is available on our podcast website and in the show notes.

John, would you leave us with a final poem?

[Final Poem – from Compulsory Figures]

John:
This is the last poem from Compulsory Figures, about being in San Francisco at Pride, the year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld gay marriage.

From a rise overlooking the Bay,
 The men’s chorus sings as one in Grace Cathedral
 At the crown of Nob Hill.
 One page in the log of HIV dead turned per day—
 Leaves illumined by time’s troubled proprietary gaze.

Incense and shadow.
 Candles put to the match.
 Organ stentorian.
 Rose window a burst of wonderment—
 At how little you have altered.

In the years since my prime, our brief union
 An aside, handwritten behind the impress
 Of constant strangers in my arms.
 Half-grasped in estranged camaraderie—
 A skeleton key of whistle stops through the Castro.

Thinning men fragmented into isolates—
 As incongruent as zones of the continent.
 Borders: artificial landmass.
 One of ravaged men with names I am not equal to,
 Can’t think to forget.

Dyslexic register of where I’ve traveled
 Jumbled toward the present.
 A churn of wake opaque behind the ferry
 Enticing us across the bay from Sausalito.

Our absolute amicability,
 An anchor with less drag than the allure docking has.
 Raz iconic and inescapable,
 Held without trial in the morning haze.
 Late June feeds off sun.

Resistant to longing,
 Entangled in harbor currents—
 Commuters commuted to tourists.
 The Pride Parade eight hours long—
 And not even the product-branded length of Market Street.

No one with stamina, ready,
 On infinite asphalt to give witness,
 Start to finish.
 The ecstatic plaintiffs for marriage
 In a convertible inching past.

Love. Stop. And go.
 Slow and fast.