Quotes from Alison Hawthorne Deming

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

Poetry is one of the most full ways of discovering what it feels like to be a human being in this particular moment, in this particular set of concerns. It's all about discovery.

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.

For me, the natural world in all its evolutionary splendor is a revelation of the divine- the inviolable matrix of cause and effect that reveals itself to us in what we cannot control or manipulate no matter how pervasive our meddling.

The peace of the land, the last islands of this peace, made me feel small. I welcomed the feeling. It was a pleasure to feel insignificant, to let my desires quiet, to feel, in the moment, the human body as an instrument attuned to peace.

Why didn't everyone feel as I did that natural beauty raises the spiritual energy of the world?

If the spirit of a place has anything to do with what a poet makes, then it must be the intensity of light (two f-stops brighter than New York) and the extreme geography that so infuse the mind in Provincetown and make one more reflective. With all that jazzed-up light, the excitement of photons bounding off water and sand, even the ordinary air says, Notice me. … the function of art is to wake us up to the very life we are living.

If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It's almost a religious experience. I feel that I could never really say the depth of feeling or connection I feel to the natural world, which has made me.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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'm just really interested in the interface of the individual with the collective. I think that's where the arts live.

I 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.