Michael Schmidt (poet)
From Wikiquote
Michael Schmidt (born 1947, in Mexico City) is a Mexican-British poet, author and scholar. He is currently Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University.
Contents |
Sourced [edit]
Lives of the Poets, Phoenix, 1988 [edit]
- 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.
- A living poem can energise another poem at five hundred years distance, or across the other side of the world.
Reading Modern Poetry, London, 1989 [edit]
- Poetry is a collaborative art, and yet—as it is being created—the most solitary and 'individual' of activities.
- Poetry is a process, a form of discovery, which if it serves a cause, transcends it.
The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006 [edit]
- 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.
- Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it.
- 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.
- In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.
