Michael Schmidt Quotes

American poet

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Michael Schmidt (born 2 March 1947 in Mexico City) is a Mexican-British poet, author and scholar. He is currently Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University.

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Prose and poetry are different in construction. You can lie back and read prose, and you can read it fast. Poetry on the other hand, requires a different kind of attention and concentration … the effect it has on the ear and the imagination.

A living poem can energise another poem at five hundred years distance, or across the other side of the world.

Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it.

Poetry is a collaborative art, and yet—as it is being created—the most solitary and 'individual' of activities.

We read with our ears

The reader does not need a technical vocabulary to read poetry, only a voice in the head or out loud which can deliver the sounds.

Poetry is a process, a form of discovery, which if it serves a cause, transcends it.

In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.

Poetry is a language with a shape

What matters in poetry is form, how words work together, the sounds and silences their combinations make. The ordered effects they produce on the attentive hearer.