Latest Alison Hawthorne Deming Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  Dog, Believe, Animal

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• I like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Use, Stitches, Research

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• I do think that the long poem speaks for an inner need for continuity. We live in a time of so many losses, disruptions, and distractions, that the need for a sense of the ongoing is quite real. The long poem is very satisfying in offering the psyche a model of coherence.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Real, Loss, Thinking

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• 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

  Long, Focus, Helping

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• 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

  Writing, Long, Anxiety

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• 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

  Justice, Challenges, Suffering

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Country, Climate, Responsible

  Source: www.terrain.org

• 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

  Hopeful, Decision, Challenges

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• 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

  Team, Self, Play

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• 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

  Hate, Racism, Greed

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• 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

  Artist, Long, Waiting

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• 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

  Add, Want, Recognition

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

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

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Teaching, Community, Satisfaction

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• 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

  Mother, Running, Teacher

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• 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

  Teacher, Hero, Artist

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• 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

  Teaching, Writing, Years

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• 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

  Teaching, Writing, Discipline

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• I came to teaching late - not until my forties - which is one reason why I'm not burned out.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Teaching, Reason Why, Late

  Source: www.terrain.org

• We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Mind, Desire, Poetry Is

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

• 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

  Sky, Earth, Action

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

• 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

  Environmental, Stuff, Bleeding

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Compassion

• As poets, we don't accept oppression; we are about a freedom of spirit, or whatever you want to call it. I think environmental concerns have to go to the deep place, so we speak from a place of great empathy for the planet - for the disadvantaged people, animals, places, cultures.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Animal, Thinking, People

• 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

  Voice, Poet, Should

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

• I do think environmental writers need to be forward thinking, not just lamenting our losses. We do need to lament; in some ways it's important to be the vessels for grief for all that's being lost on our planet. But we also need to be forward thinking.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Grief, Loss, Thinking

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.