51 Quotes by Alison Hawthorne Deming

I don’t know much about death and the sorriest lesson I’ve learned is that words, my most trusted guardians against chaos, offer small comfort in the face of anyone’s dying.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.

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.

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.