51 Quotes by Alison Hawthorne Deming

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. To externalize it, sort it out, put it down, look at it, and hopefully it would become clearer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.