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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

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Alison Hawthorne Deming
Age: 79
Born: 1946
Born: January 1
Essayist
Poet
Writer
Helps
Dance
Digression
Focus
Controlling
Helping
Sustained
Long
Sustain
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Invites
Metaphor
Poem

More quotes by 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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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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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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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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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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
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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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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
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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
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I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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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
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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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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
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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'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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I like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.
Alison Hawthorne Deming