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

The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006

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Michael Schmidt (poet)10

American poet 1947

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“I don’t think it’s a responsibility, but I certainly think it’s something poetry can do, and I think that poetry has a unique ability to do it because of its self-referential nature and its self-conscious nature. And I mean that in the sense that, in prose, we’re not often as conscious of the language and the operation of language itself. Our focus in on the content, on what is denotatively produced. In poetry we are trained, or at least readers of poetry are trained, to attend to or account for the structures of language as well as what that language conveys.”

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On if the poet has a responsibility in “‘The language is constructing our ideas more than we are deploying the language’: An interview with Gregory Pardlo” http://gulfcoastmag.org/reviews-and-interviews/art-and-reviews/an-interview-with-gregory-pardlo/ in Gulf Coast Magazine (2019 Jul 17)