Alison Hawthorne Deming Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

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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

  Expression, Literature, World

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

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• 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

  Powerful, Thinking, America

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

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• I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about... I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying... Beginning was awful.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Real, Struggle, Writing

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

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• I'm always doing poems from a place of not-knowing, a place of ignorance in a way.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Ignorance, Knowing, Not Knowing

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

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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

  Confused, Facts, Complicated

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

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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

  Writing, Emotional, Psychics

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

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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

  Thinking, Way, Contradiction

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

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• 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

  Writing, Discovery, Mind

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

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• 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

  Writing, Ignorance, Discovery

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

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• Poetry is a really helpful instrument. It's so physical; the musicality becomes a sort of expression of the body. The mind is there too, in the formal aspects of the poem. The emotions are there in the way the senses gather things into the poem.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Expression, Mind, Body

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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

  Discovery, Way, Moments

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• 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.

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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

  Teaching, Community, Satisfaction

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

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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

  Writing, Different, Bearing Witness

  Interview with Christopher Adamson, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

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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

  Long, Focus, Helping

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

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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

  Use, Stitches, Research

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

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• 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.

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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

  Teacher, Hero, Artist

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

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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

  Mother, Running, Teacher

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

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• 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.

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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

  Writing, Thinking, Culture

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

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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

  Art, Thinking, Individual

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

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• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Kind

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