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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
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Alison Hawthorne Deming
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 1
Essayist
Poet
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Start
Prose
Attention
Sentences
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Music
Poet
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Wooed
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Cadence
Grows
Impatient
Practice
Sentence
More quotes by Alison Hawthorne Deming
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
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
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
I'm always writing towards a discovery. When I'm writing poems in particular, I'm often writing because a few images coalesced in my mind and I thought, I wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them. I'm trying to learn something every time I write a poem.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
When we're writing anything, we're bearing witness to the time we live in and how it's different from any other time in history.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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
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.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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
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
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
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
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
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
I've been accused of darkness by my inner light.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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
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
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
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
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
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