Alison Hawthorne Deming, a poet and essayist who focuses on issues of science and the environment, visited Smith this week to speak from her work. She had some wonderful comments during a Q&A on her writing.
I always ask environmental writers how they maintain hope in the face of the immense challenges we face: species extinction, climate change, overpopulation, water shortages, pollution, ocean acidification and coral bleaching, overfishing …. the list goes frighteningly on and on.
Hawthorne Deming called on the ideas of W.S. Merwin. “He said, when you’re in a life raft, that’s the time for your best behavior, not your worst behavior. We have to choose to have hope.” She went on to say that “when we’re experiencing loss and grief, we should work on that loss… What remains is the more precious to us.”
She spoke of that work on loss very beautifully as “an instruction to the moral imagination” to be given to us by ourselves.
I’m reminded of a song by The Flaming Lips titled “The Gash (Battle Hymn for the Wounded Mathematician).” It’s a brilliant anthem for embattled scientists everywhere:
Is that gash in your leg
Really why you have stopped?
Cuz I’ve noticed all the others,
Though they’re gashed, they’re still going,
And I feel like the real reason
That you’re quitting is admitting
That you’ve lost all the will
To battle on
Will the fight for our sanity
Be the fight of our lives?
When we’ve lost all the reasons
That we thought that we had …
So the battle that we’re in
Rages on, ’til the end
With explosions, wounds are open
Sights and smells, eyes and noses,
But the thought that went unspoken
Is understanding that we’re broken
Still the last volunteer battles on
Battles on ….
Battles on ….
listen on youtube
Marvelous.
Hawthorne Deming also commented on her writing process. She started by mentioning that an essay she’d just read from “operates largely by digression – one of the essayist’s great friends.” Indeed.
She writes poems, she said, by “writing down snippets in a notebook and looking for some charge …. When I’m stuck, I go through a fairly manic process of pulling books off the shelf. I’m not going to plagiarize, but I’m going to steal a device. How do people end poems, anyway?” Fitting, for a poet whose work bubbles over with cleverly deployed references to literature and science.
“I won’t say poems arrive ready made,” she said, “but the impulse arrives. And when the impulse arrives, I try to put down whatever I’m doing and write it. That particular constellation of energy, passion, whatever it is, might not be there [later].”
She’s interested, she said, in developing what it means to be a woman in the 21st century, and all it entails – a theme that preoccupies me also.
Between essays and poems, “the poems are a little more mysterious,” she said. “I’m not always really sure where they come from or where they’re going.”
And so, following those little mysteries on their journey into the dark and lightness of the human soul, I’ll close this entry for tonight.
Night. A woman betrayed.
Insects gather
on the cabin window
so that all she can see
is a plague of gray moths.
She’s sick of the body’s
dumb song, the frenzy
of insects for light.
Why does a moth do that
if it’s nocturnal?
If it woke up in the daytime,
it could simply
have what it wants.
–Alison Hawthorne Deming
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