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I came to teaching late - not until my forties - which is one reason why I'm not burned out.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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Alison Hawthorne Deming
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 1
Essayist
Poet
Writer
Forties
Burned
Forty
Late
Teaching
Came
Reason
More quotes by 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
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
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
We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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
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
I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Sometimes it gets talked about as if life is all about the individual, and I don't think it is. I'm really interested in what writing can contribute to a kind of cultural intelligence.
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
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
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
I've been accused of darkness by my inner light.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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
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
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
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
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
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
The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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