I came to teaching late - not until my forties - which is one reason why I'm not burned out.
Alison Hawthorne DemingI don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.
Alison Hawthorne DemingI 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.
Alison Hawthorne DemingBringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.
Alison Hawthorne DemingI'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 DemingYou see this incredible capacity for replication in nature, survival, development, all of these things that are around us all the time in nature that just happen. By comparison, human life is really, really complicated. We're gifted animals, but we are so complicated. Nothing is easy for us, except maybe eating too much.
Alison Hawthorne Deming