Michael Schmidt (poet)

"Poetry is a language with a shape"

"We read with our ears"

"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."

"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."

"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."