Alison Hawthorne Deming

Once you realize that human actions affect every bit of earth and sky, you realize that the environment isn't just what surrounds…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

It's extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don't have voices, including the other animals that we…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

I've been accused of darkness by my inner light.

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

What keeps me level is the refusal to let the best of human aspirations die in the face of the challenges. I…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

I'm extremely interested in science as the mythos within which I live. Science tells me what kind of animal I am, what…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

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

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

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

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

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

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

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…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

I'm really interested in culture because it is such a powerful human force, particularly in America where we think it's all about…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

Climate change is a moral challenge, not simply an economic or technological problem. It is linked to social justice, because it is…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

I'm trying to learn something about making a balance between the inner life and the outer life. I wouldn't write if I…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

I'm always trying to bring as many poetic properties as possible to the essay without making it too overburdened.

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

When we're writing anything, we're bearing witness to the time we live in and how it's different from any other time in…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

Poetry is a really helpful instrument. It's so physical; the musicality becomes a sort of expression of the body. The mind is…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

There are landscapes and species that are not going to be here a hundred years from now, fifty years from now. One…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

I do think that the long poem speaks for an inner need for continuity. We live in a time of so many…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

I'm filled with despair. We live in a pathological culture filled with rage and bitterness and greed. The hate-mongering and racism is…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

The world is going to be less biologically rich for quite some time in the future. We are always weeping that we…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

I had wanted for so many years to feel that writing really was at the center of my life, not something I…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming

I was attacked by two dogs when I was three and a half years old. I'm lucky to be alive. My face…

— Alison Hawthorne Deming