Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alison Hawthorne Deming
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 1
Essayist
Poet
Writer
Might
Reflective
Feel
Contributing
Feels
Interested
Writing
Ways
Way
Help
Make
Culture
Deepen
Thinking
Write
Connectedness
Helping
Empathetic

More quotes by 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
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
The world is going to be less biologically rich for quite some time in the future. We are always weeping that we live in such a diminished world, but we are experiencing a biologically rich world compared to what the future will look like. Bearing witness to that is a beautiful gift.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
I like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.
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
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'm always doing poems from a place of not-knowing, a place of ignorance in a way.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.
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
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
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 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've been accused of darkness by my inner light.
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
I think I started writing as a young person because I felt a lot of psychic confusion and emotional confusion, and writing was a way to sort it out. You know, to externalize it, sort it out, put it down, look at it, and hopefully it would become clearer.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming