Quote

As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.

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
World
Producing
Entirely
Writers
Works
Expression
Literature
Getting
Individual

More quotes by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
It's extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don't have voices, including the other animals that we share the planet with and the places that are endangered or being lost.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
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
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.
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
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
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
Image
I grow very impatient with prose writers who don't pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you're wooed by the music of language you want to put that into your practice.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
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
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
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
Image
The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price.
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 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