"I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going."
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Alison Hawthorne Deming quotes (page 2 of 3)
58 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem."
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"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 history."
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"I'm just really interested in the interface of the individual with the collective. I think that's where the arts live."
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"As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world."
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"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."
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"I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about... I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying... Beginning was awful."
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"The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price."
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"Writers want recognition, audience, some corroboration that all those hours at the desk and in daydreams add up to something in the esteem of others."
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"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."
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"For me teaching has provided community and livelihood and the satisfaction of passing along what I've learned to others."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I came to teaching late - not until my forties - which is one reason why I'm not burned out."
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"I think you have to live inside your contradictions and find a way to accept that that's the human condition - to be forced to live in contradiction."
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"I think 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. You know, to externalize it, sort it out, put it down, look at it, and hopefully it would become clearer."
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"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 I thought, "I wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them." I'm trying to learn something every time I write a poem."
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"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."
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"I'm trying to learn something about making a balance between the inner life and the outer life. I wouldn't write if I didn't need to be making those discoveries, if I didn't feel the perpetual ignorance of being a human being."
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