Quote

For me teaching has provided community and livelihood and the satisfaction of passing along what I've learned to others.

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
Teaching
Along
Learned
Community
Livelihood
Others
Provided
Passings
Passing
Satisfaction

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'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'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
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
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.
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 like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.
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
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
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
The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You see this incredible capacity for replication in nature, survival, development, all of these things that are around us all the time in nature that just happen. By comparison, human life is really, really complicated. We're gifted animals, but we are so complicated. Nothing is easy for us, except maybe eating too much.
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
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