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. — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share Image
I grow very impatient with prose writers who don't pay attention to the cadence of the sentence. If you start as a poet, you're wooed by the music of language; you want to put that into your practice. — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share Image
Once you realize that human actions affect every bit of earth and sky, you realize that the environment isn't just what surrounds us -… — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share Image
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… — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share Image
What keeps me level is the refusal to let the best of human aspirations die in the face of the challenges. I make a… — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share Image
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… — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share Image
I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep… — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price. — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share Image
As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a… — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share
Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment. — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share Image
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… — Alison Hawthorne Deming Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
