The Blood Of A Poet Quotes & Sayings

If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown, and then blood red. It's like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It's warm and it stinks like shit and it's unaccountably and endlessly good. It's thick and it goes on for miles and it isn't so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. That's all you know. — Eileen Myles

Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of "Kill! kill! kill!" and "Blood! blood! blood! — Robert Graves

There are monsters all around us
They can be so hard to see
hey don't have fangs, no blood-soaked claws
They look like you and me.

But we're not defenseless
We're no damsels in distress
Together we can fend off the attack
All we gotta do is watch our backs.

Your body is beautiful how it is
Who you love is nobody's business
We all contemplate life and death
It's the poet who gives these thoughts
breath.

The monster is strong, don't be mistaken
It thrives on fear-keeps us isolated
But together we can fend off its attack
All we gotta do is watch our backs.

In your darkest hour
When the fight's made you weary
When you think you've lost your power
When you can't see clearly
When you're ready to surrender
Give in to the black
look over your shoulder
I've got your back. — Gayle Forman

He never described himself as a poet or his work as poetry. The fact that the lines do not come to the edge of the page is no guarantee. Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation. He hated to argue about the techniques of verse. The poem is a dirty, bloody, burning thing that has to be grabbed first with bare hands. Once the fire celebrated Light, the dirt Humility, the blood Sacrifice. Now the poets are professional fire-eaters, freelancing at any carnival. The fire goes down easily and honours no one in particular. — Leonard Cohen

I do not mean merely in its adding to enthusiasm that intellectual basis which in its strength, or that more obvious influence about which Wordsworth was thinking when he said very nobly that poetry was merely the impassioned expression in the face of science, and that when science would put on a form of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion and deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first and Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence on the artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the sense of limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the characteristics of the real artist. — Oscar Wilde

If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins. — Ralph Fletcher

The things that were needed to keep the imagination free were "all written down in this age of reason." It was time to take the opportunity to use this imagination. All bets were off, "Fire at will." Standing next to the message in Pulling Punches, where there was only the faintest hint of solace, the message in The Ink in the Well seemed to be that in Picasso, Cocteau, and Sartre, a home of sorts had been found that went some way to - if not answering the questions - opening the mind to give the insight possible to find the answers. The references to Sartre and Cocteau were oblique and hidden in the phrase "The blood of a poet, the ink in the well, it's all written down in this age of reason. — Christopher E. Young

The typewriter is neat and compact and sturdy and blue, just the right machine to pound out a missive of love. When you strike the keys it's a sound that hasn't been heard in the qorld world for thirty years (we are so far away from a time when typewriters won world wars). When you strike the keys they make a sound like a pistol shot, a sound so definite and sure you feel like a genius, or an orayor orator, or a beat poet. When you strike the keys you just want to keep on fucking writing. You have to wrestle with the thing, like I am doing now, steer it like an old manual car, keep the words together and right and on the page, but the blood and muscle of a typewriter, it is a beautiful thing. — Yvette Walker

In addition to pumping the blood of life within our bodies, we may think of the heart as a belief-to-matter translator. It converts the perceptions of our experiences, beliefs, and imagination into the coded language of waves that communicate with the world beyond our bodies. Perhaps this is what philosopher and poet John Mackenzie meant when he stated, "The distinction between what is real and what is imaginary is not one that can be finely maintained ... all existing thing are ... imaginary." — Gregg Braden

The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years. — Aberjhani

If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the house of man. — William Wordsworth

For if in careless summer days
In groves of Ashtaroth we whored,
Repentant now, when winds blow cold,
We kneel before our rightful lord;
The lord of all, the money-god,
Who rules us blood and hand and brain,
Who gives the roof that stops the wind,
And, giving, takes away again;
Who spies with jealous, watchful care,
Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways,
Who picks our words and cuts our clothes,
And maps the pattern of our days;
Who chills our anger, curbs our hope,
And buys our lives and pays with toys,
Who claims as tribute broken faith,
Accepted insults, muted joys;
Who binds with chains the poet's wit,
The navvy's strength, the soldier's pride,
And lays the sleek, estranging shield
Between the lover and his bride. — George Orwell

From the beginning, about the rude altar of the god, to the days of Goethe, of Leopardi, and of Victor Hugo, the poet is the leader in the dance of life; and the phrase by which we name his singularity, the poetic temperament, denotes the primacy of that passion in his blood with which the frame of other men is less richly charged. — George Edward Woodberry

Humans have the ability to rewrite history. Within a few decades it is not even questioned. Stories of the past become as real as the world you walk through today. Wars are waged over false history. Sins are denied. All for mankind to move forward and feel comfortable about its past. Your true history is written in the stars. Look up, breathe in, and be humbled by the ones who came before you. The ones who have suffered, who have endured, who have overcome. Their blood is alive in you. Their spirits roam freely in the heavens above. — Jason E. Hodges

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood. — Federico Garcia Lorca

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears. — Emil Cioran

The poet, as a rule, is a half-man - a sissy, not a real person, and he is in no shape to lead real men in matters of blood, or courage. — Charles Bukowski

The poet who glories in war is a spinner of lies. The poet who delights in visceral detail, for the ... purpose of feeding that lust for blood, has all the depth of a puddle of piss ... — Steven Erikson

Anybody who is born in Santa Rosa must turn out to be either an artist or a poet, for the spirit of the hills gets into your blood out there, — Robert Ripley

The lamp you lighted in the olden time Will show you my heart's-blood beating through the rhyme: A poet's journal, writ in fire and tears ... Then slow deliverance, with the gaps of years ... — Bayard Taylor

So Lightning says to Mud,
"What would happen if I struck your blood?"
And Mud says, "Brother,
It would hurt,
And make me the mother
Of every living thing.
But, Fire Boy, you ain't lifting my grass skirt
Until you burn me a ring. — Sherman Alexie

Did the poet use red to symbolize blood? Anger? Lust? Or is the wheelbarrow simply red because red sounded better than black? — Jay Asher

Edin Viso's poetry and prose bear the obvious marks of dark drama-of a soul variously splayed apart and cinched back together...This is a book of psalms-at once craggy and rough as the Balkan landscape, and sublime as sunrise on the Aegean Sea. There are calluses on the palms, dried blood on the knuckles, and dirt under the fingernails of these pieces. And there is grace...Edin is a poet who knows the value of a blanket, a single orange, a moment shared...He is a man who is unafraid, and who does, in the pages before you, "take off his skin and dance in his bones.". — Stephen T. Berg

Every word he wrote would be strong with that sweet purity and simplicity that was his gift alone, placing him higher than any living poet, secure on his pedestal apart from the world, like a great silent god above the little dwarfs of men tossed hither and thither in the stream of life. From the crystal clearness of his brain the images became words, and the words became magic, and the whole was transcendent of beauty, one thread touching another, alike in their perfection and their certitude of immortality. Thus it seemed to me he was not a living figure of flesh and blood, but a monument to the national pride of his country, his England, and now and then he would bow gravely from his pedestal and scatter to the people a small quantity of his thought, which they would grub for on their poor rough ground, then clasp to their hungry hearts as treasure. — Daphne Du Maurier

And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and that few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink. — Federico Garcia Lorca