When All Is After

"Peter Barton would get a wink of approval and a smile from William Carlos Williams. His poetry is simple yet reverberant, his aching wishes and pale sorrows are those we all share. You will read these poems more than once."

-Peter Davis, Academy Award winning filmmaker, author of Girl of My Dreams

"I seem to be stories now," reflects the narrator of Peter Barton's When All Is After, but the poems refuse tidy narratives and easy explanations. Here is a narrator that can observe a beloved after decades of marriage, his adult children, or experiences from his own past with eyes that are as open and attentive as in a first encounter. While this may be a debut poetry collection, the candor and complexity Barton brings to his representations of daily life build upon a long, accomplished practice in filmmaking and photography. What's striking about Barton's gaze is that even when he trains it on some of the book's darker subject matters, such as mortality, regret, and addiction, his commitment to honesty is not brutal but deeply tender."

-Allyson Paty, Author of Five O'clock on The Shore and co-founder and editor of

Singing Saw Press

"I'm married to Mandy Patinkin who understands Shakespeare as if it were his first language, and while I only understand it when he speaks it, I have a love of poetry, which he does not relate to...That might change soon, because I intend to read Peter Barton's new collection to him on a nightly basis, because they speak such truth to the complex experience of a long life, the wonder of still being here, the glory of being in the moment and the challenge of not letting the past and regret dominate the astonishing now."

-Kathryn Grody actress and author of A Mom's Life

Peter Barton is an award-winning poet, filmmaker, photographer and author. His poetry explores aging, family, legacy, heartbreak. While serving in the Peace Corps in Chile, Barton began writing poems in response to the Vietnam War. He created a collection of poems as a form of anti-war activism, five of which were published in The Saturday Review in 1969. Barton's poetry won the 2021 2nd and 3rd place cash award at the Westmoreland Arts and Heritage Festival which also published his work. In addition, his poems have been published by the Orchard Street Press. Dial Press published his book, Staying Power, a collection of non-fiction behind- the-scenes profiles of un-rich, un-famous actors, musicians, and dancers-the foot soldiers in the performing arts. Barton's aim was to show young readers that they could find fulfillment on stage without becoming celebrities. Barton's film work has been featured on CBS, PBS, Showtime, and HBO. Barton has three Emmy nominations and has won three CINE Gold Eagle Awards for his filmmaking. Riff' 65, a student film he collaborated on, won the equivalent of a Student Academy Award before the category was officially established. He began his career teaching at NYU with Marty Scorsese (Oliver Stone was his student), working on the crew of the original Woodstock and making politically engaged films with Newsreel. Two films he collaborated on, Eddie and Janie's Janie, are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Barton is the founder of Groundswell, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to making documentaries that amplify marginalized voices. Groundswell's film, Cries from Nagasaki, an improvised experimental short inspired by children's accounts of the first atomic bombings, was an official selection of the Cannes Shorts Corner, Sedona, Newport, LA and Hollywood DV Film Festivals. His work producing and directing Names Can Really Hurt Us, A CBS Anti-Defamation League special, earned him a nomination for the Edward R. Murrow Award and three Emmy nominations. Barton's improvisational feature Film, The Suicide Auditions, shot at Niagara Falls, won first prize at the Georgetown Film Festival He directed, edited, shot and co-produced, Women of '69, Unboxed, a portrait of a group of women who graduated from college with high hopes the same year as Hillary Clinton. The film won first prize at the Queens World and New York Indie Festivals, as well as a special audience prize at the Woods Hole Festival. The film was broadcast continent-wide on PBS. Barton taught film production and screenwriting at New York University, Bennington College, Columbia University and Brooklyn College. He was class poet at Dartmouth where a play he wrote, Pand, helped inaugurate the experimental theater at the new Hopkins Center. He holds an M.F.A. in playwriting and directing from the Yale School of Drama. While there, he wrote and acted in Dawn Song, a full-length play about Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce tribe. It inaugurated the Morse College dramat at Yale. On the heels of the Kennedy assassination, the play examined the importance of wise leadership in making lasting change. His films are currently available on the Groundswell Media Channel on YouTube and on the Groundswell Media website.