Michael Schmidt (poet)

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. Sourced Lives of the Poets, Phoenix, 1988 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. Reading Modern Poetry, London, 1989 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 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. External links Category:People from Mexico City Category:Poets from the United Kingdom Category:Publishers from the United Kingdom Category:1947 births Category:Living people Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Category:Harvard University alumni Category:University of Cambridge faculty