Michael Schmidt (poet)

"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."

"Poetry is a language with a shape"

"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."

"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."