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Alison Hawthorne Deming Biography

Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946 Hartford, Connecticut) is an American poet, essayist and teacher, currently Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

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Alison Hawthorne Deming Quotes

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.

Complicated, Confused, Creatures, Facts, Same, Time

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.

Challenge, Challenges, Justice, Suffer, Suffering, World

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.

Appetite, Cried, Mother, Running, Teacher, Tried

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.

Animal, Interested, Mythos, Understanding, World

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.

Inform, Informed, Poet, Should, Terms, Voice

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

Enlarge, Research, Stitches, Use

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.

Cadence, Focus, Important, Musical, Properties, Prose

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.

Animal, Complicated, Development, Eating, Life, Survival

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.

Animal, Call, Deep, People, Speak, Thinking

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.

Concerns, Discovery, Human, Moments, Way

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

Change, Climate, Country, Heaviest, Responsible

Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.

Moment, Moments, Poetry, Science, Stuff, Way

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.

Discovery, Explore, Images, Mind, Wonder, Writing

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.

Artist, Decide, Long, Wait, Waiting

As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world.

Expression, Literature, Producing, World, Writers

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.

Admire, Discipline, Process, Teaching, Writing

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.

Art, Enormity, Important, Planet, Results

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.

Know, Say, Static, Thinking, Waiting, Writing

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.

Empathy, Experience, Feelings, Religious

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

Community, Provided, Satisfaction, Teaching

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