Alison Hawthorne Deming Quotes

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  • The environment is becoming so much a central concern, I see environmental concerns just bleeding into poetries all over the place. My hope is that we won't have these environmental poets tucked over here and everybody else doing cool stuff with language and consciousness elsewhere, but that all of it will become one thing.

  • I'm really interested in culture because it is such a powerful human force, particularly in America where we think it's all about the individual.

    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • I'm just really interested in the interface of the individual with the collective. I think that's where the arts live.

    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price.

    Source: www.terrain.org
  • I don't know much about death and the sorriest lesson I've learned is that words, my most trusted guardians against chaos, offer small comfort in the face of anyone's dying.

    Dying   Comfort   Lessons  
    Alison Hawthorne Deming (1994). “Temporary Homelands”
  • As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.

    Death   Fall   Thinking  
    Alison Hawthorne Deming (1994). “Temporary Homelands”
  • Teachers have had a great effect on me as a child. I've always loved school and had a great appetite for learning. I cried when it was time to go back home and tried to jump from my mother's moving car to run back there.

    Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.
  • Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.

    Stuff   Way   Moments  
    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about... I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying... Beginning was awful.

    Real   Struggle   Writing  
    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • Sometimes it gets talked about as if life is all about the individual, and I don't think it is. I'm really interested in what writing can contribute to a kind of cultural intelligence.

    Writing   Thinking   Kind  
  • I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

  • I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.

  • Life seems complicated to me; I feel confused a lot of the time by life. I feel confused about the fact that we can be so tender as creatures to one another, and so monstrous at the same time.

    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • Earth's immune system - its rapid response team of self-protection - becomes invigorated at times of peril. And one sees it at play now in the upwelling of grassroots work aimed at finding a sustainable future.

    Team   Self   Play  
    Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.
  • What keeps me level is the refusal to let the best of human aspirations die in the face of the challenges. I make a moral decision to be hopeful.

    Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.
  • Once you realize that human actions affect every bit of earth and sky, you realize that the environment isn't just what surrounds us - it's all one whole.

    Sky   Earth   Action  
    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • I'm interested in thinking about how are we contributing to the culture, what we can write that might help us deepen the culture, make us more reflective, make us more empathetic, make us feel our connectedness in other ways.

    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • We're facing enormous changes in our planetary life, with climate change and the adaptations that all natural systems are going to have to make to these climate changes, and so it's extremely important to bear witness to what's happening.

    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • I do think that the long poem speaks for an inner need for continuity. We live in a time of so many losses, disruptions, and distractions, that the need for a sense of the ongoing is quite real. The long poem is very satisfying in offering the psyche a model of coherence.

    Real   Loss   Thinking  
    Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.
  • Teachers have been heroes to me, as well as artists and writers, and I'm honored to be among their ranks. There is always a lot of grousing about the academy. I suppose it comes from our all-American anti-authoritarianism.

    Teacher   Hero   Artist  
    Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.
  • I'm trying to learn something about making a balance between the inner life and the outer life. I wouldn't write if I didn't need to be making those discoveries, if I didn't feel the perpetual ignorance of being a human being.

    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • I'm always doing poems from a place of not-knowing, a place of ignorance in a way.

    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • As poets, we don't accept oppression; we are about a freedom of spirit, or whatever you want to call it. I think environmental concerns have to go to the deep place, so we speak from a place of great empathy for the planet - for the disadvantaged people, animals, places, cultures.

  • I think you have to live inside your contradictions and find a way to accept that that's the human condition - to be forced to live in contradiction.

    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • Poetry is a really helpful instrument. It's so physical; the musicality becomes a sort of expression of the body. The mind is there too, in the formal aspects of the poem. The emotions are there in the way the senses gather things into the poem.

    Expression   Mind   Body  
  • For me teaching has provided community and livelihood and the satisfaction of passing along what I've learned to others.

    Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.
  • I was attacked by two dogs when I was three and a half years old. I'm lucky to be alive. My face was stitched back together and here I still am, gratefully so. I believe that experience shocked me into a deep alliance with the animal world, its beauty and viciousness and terror.

    Dog   Believe   Animal  
    Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.
  • I'm filled with despair. We live in a pathological culture filled with rage and bitterness and greed. The hate-mongering and racism is reaching a frightening pitch.

    Hate   Racism   Greed  
    Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.
  • For the poets, my hope is that they will, quite simply, feel the obligation to be really informed about the situation in which we find ourselves, in terms of our imperiled planet. You should inform yourself so deeply that it becomes part of your nature, part of your voice.

    Voice   Poet   Should  
    Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.
  • What I like about teaching is the discipline of finding words to unpack the artistic process. And I admire the drive in students who want to write, the mystery of how artistic talent unfolds.

    Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.
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