Quote

Poetry is one of the most full ways of discovering what it feels like to be a human being in this particular moment, in this particular set of concerns. It's all about discovery.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alison Hawthorne Deming
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 1
Essayist
Poet
Writer
Feels
Poetry
Way
Particular
Like
Ways
Full
Moment
Concerns
Moments
Discovering
Human
Discovery
Humans
Concern

More quotes by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
For me teaching has provided community and livelihood and the satisfaction of passing along what I've learned to others.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
I'm just really interested in the interface of the individual with the collective. I think that's where the arts live.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
I am a result of what has happened on this planet - how could I find the art to say that? I can't, and yet, I am drawn to it because of the enormity of it. That seems really important.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
I had wanted for so many years to feel that writing really was at the center of my life, not something I did in my spare time. So the writing and teaching feel in some way to be one thing - the personal engagement and the social engagement good partners.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
One needs to be on guard against expecting external powers to decide when you can take yourself seriously as an artist. It can be a long wait - and lead to endless appetite.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
Writers want recognition, audience, some corroboration that all those hours at the desk and in daydreams add up to something in the esteem of others.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
I've been accused of darkness by my inner light.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
I'm always trying to ask myself both Who am I as an individual? and What are the cultural forces that have made me the person that I am? How can I understand myself as a cultural creature as well as an individual? I'm really obsessed with that question, and always asking my students to consider it.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It's almost a religious experience. I feel that I could never really say the depth of feeling or connection I feel to the natural world, which has made me.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
A lot of times students will come up to me and say, Well, I can't write because I don't know what I think about such-and-such. And I say, That's why you have to write. You don't wait until you know, because then who cares - it's static.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming