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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

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Alison Hawthorne Deming
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 1
Essayist
Poet
Writer
Earth
Surround
Human
Actions
Sky
Humans
Realize
Whole
Environment
Every
Realizing
Bits
Surrounds
Action
Affect

More quotes by Alison Hawthorne Deming

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I like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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For me teaching has provided community and livelihood and the satisfaction of passing along what I've learned to others.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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Climate change is a moral challenge, not simply an economic or technological problem. It is linked to social justice, because it is the poor citizens of the world who will suffer the most from our excesses.
Alison Hawthorne Deming