51 Quotes by Alison Hawthorne Deming

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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