Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alison Hawthorne Deming
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 1
Essayist
Poet
Writer
Think
Collectives
Thinking
Collective
Arts
Interested
Individual
Art
Live
Interface
Really
Interfaces

More quotes by 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 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 always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.
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
I do think environmental writers need to be forward thinking, not just lamenting our losses. We do need to lament in some ways it's important to be the vessels for grief for all that's being lost on our planet. But we also need to be forward thinking.
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
I'm extremely interested in science as the mythos within which I live. Science tells me what kind of animal I am, what kind of a universe I live in. It's always deepening my understanding of the natural world.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
There are landscapes and species that are not going to be here a hundred years from now, fifty years from now. One gift we as writers give to the world is to bear witness to these landscapes and species as we have experienced them.
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 to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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 came to teaching late - not until my forties - which is one reason why I'm not burned out.
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