Alison Hawthorne Deming

b. 1946

http://www.alisonhawthornedeming.com

A descendant of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of Science and Other Poems, a highly praised collection which garnered the 1993 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has contributed poems to magazines for many years and was awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize in 1983. Deming also writes essays, and a collection of her work in this genre was published as Temporary Homelands in 1994.

Deming was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1946. Though native to New England, she has studied and taught in many other regions, and in 1990 she took a position as director of the University of Arizona's Poetry Center in Tucson. Deming wrote of the shock of that particular transition in Temporary Homelands: "The midday radiation bit into me like lasers. I slapped on sunscreen, gulped warm water from the canteen, and began to feel my good English metaphors—'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?'—fall away, along with my gardening skills, my ability to read the sky and the seasons, and my confidence that moving to Tucson was a good idea." Temporary Homelands itself has met with favorable reviews; Lela Stromenger in the Arizona Republic hailed it as "a strong book" and praised "Deming's refusal to simply restate the pieties of conventional nature writing, a genre that has produced many gifted and dedicated authors who have viewpoints to push or information to disseminate or theories to expound, or, occasionally, axes to grind." Speaking of Deming's switch from poetry to the essay form, Susan English in the Spokane, Washington, Spokesman-Review declared that "[it's] her first attempt at narrative and the genre is clearly well within her range of competence. At many points . . . Deming even excels at the writing style." Temporary Homelands also includes essays on other places Deming has lived, such as the remote Canadian island of Grand Manan as well as New England.

Science and Other Poems "is a dense, majestic, wise and ambitious book," according to Deborah DeNicola in the Boston Book Review. It takes as its subject the frequent interaction between the scientific and the personal. Specific poems within the volume speak of heart surgery with lasers, the physical workings or failings of the eye and artistic painting, endangered species, and the possibility of the spirit living on after the death of the body. In awarding Science and Other Poems the 1993 Walt Whitman Award, judge Gerald Stern wrote: "I greatly admire Alison Deming's lucid and precise language, her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning. I am taken, as all readers will be, by the knowledge she displays and how she puts this knowledge to a poetic use; but I am equally taken—I am more taken—by the wisdom that lies behind the knowledge."

Career

Worked in public and women's health care for fifteen years; University of Southern Maine, Portland, instructor, 1983-87; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, coordinator of writing fellowship program, 1988-90; University of Arizona Poetry Center, Tucson, director, 1990—. Visiting lecturer in writing at Vermont College, 1983-85; has served on several academic advisory committees; guest lecturer in such locations as Oklahoma, Maine, Arizona, and Alaska.

Bibliography

Science and Other Poems, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1994.
Temporary Homelands (essays), Mercury House (San Francisco, CA), 1994.
(Editor) Poems of the American West: A Columbia Anthology, Columbia University Press, 1995.
The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
The Edges of the Civilized World: A Journey in Nature and Culture, Picador ISA, 1998.
Writing the Sacred Into the Real, Milkweed Editions, 2001.

Also contributor of poems and essays to periodicals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, Calliope, Crazyhorse, Cumberland Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly Review, Equinox: Writing for a New Culture, Georgia Review, Great River Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Louisville Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Orion Magazine, Penumbra, Poetry NOW, Portland Review of the Arts, Provincetown Arts, Rhetoric Review, Rio Grande Review, Sequoia, Shankpainter, Sierra, Sonora Review, Tendril, and Wilderness. Contributor of poems and essays to anthologies, including The Uncommon Touch: Poetry and Fiction from the Stanford Writing Program, Stanford University, 1989; The Eloquent Edge: 15 Maine Women Writers, Acadia Press, 1990; The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature, Peregrine Smith, 1991; The Pushcart Prize XVII: Best of the Small Press, Pushcart Press, 1993; Cape Discovery: The Fine Arts Work Center Anthology, Sheepmeadow Press, 1994; Writing It Down for James: Writers on Life and Craft, Graywolf, 1994; Place of the Wild: A Wildlands Anthology, Island Press, 1994; American Nature Writing, Sierra Club Books, 1995.