Michael Schmidt

The first time I had lunch with Michael I was terrified. Through my old role as Manchester Cathedral’s poet-in-residence, I had, in passing, already met him. On that occasion, he had warmed to my love for the Book of Common Prayer and wanted to talk further. However, when he invited me to lunch, I rather panicked: lunch with Michael Schmidt, the great publisher, and editor of PN Review? In my head, his very name was raised up in titanic block capitals. I was sure I was about to undergo, over pizza and a blood-orange fizzy soda, the most horrible interrogation, part-university entrance interview, part-essay tutorial.

The Michael I met and, of course, have since come to know and love, was no grim intellectual or terrifying don. Certainly, I was both exhilarated and knackered after that first proper meeting. We’d spoken about all the things you might expect: poets and poetry old and new, modernism and formalism, the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible, as well as God and the state of the Church of England. However, while all of that talk mattered, I was blown away by something else, something I began to grasp about Michael’s abiding character: his joy, and his intellectual curiosity; his generosity and capacity to attend to the things that matter. Over that first lunch, I started to understand that while Michael has, as an editor, a fierce passion for the stuff he loves, he is determined not to be doctrinaire or intellectually priggish. It should come as no surprise, then, that PN Review reflects that generosity. His is not the ...