Alison Hawthorne Deming by Catherine Sholtis
Anthropocene Art
Anthropocene art is the creative content coming out of the present geologic age that makes commentary on the relationship between humanity and nature, using present ideas as well as cultural memory to inspire appreciation, concern, and activism in its audience to guide them toward a more environmentally oriented future.
A Brief Biography of Alison Hawthorne Deming
Alison Hawthorne Deming was born in 1946 in Hartford, Connecticut. She is the great-granddaughter of American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne. While she found ways and outlets for her writing over the years, she dropped out of college as a teen mother and worked in women’s healthcare 9for fifteen years before joining the wider academic community, receiving an M.F.A in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has received two fellowships from the NEA, Wallace Stegner at Stanford, and the Fine Arts Work Center of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Deming has many university affiliations, and residencies at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, and the Hermitage Artists Retreat, but she is the official Professor of Environment and Social Justice, teaching creative writing at the University of Arizona. Deming currently divides her time between her homes in Tuscan, Arizona and New Brunswick, Canada. Her most recent work is her collection of poetry, Stairway to Heaven, published in 2016. (Deming Bio, Buntin).
As an Anthropocene Artist:
I believe that Alison Hawthorne Deming fits the characteristics of an Anthropocene artist because her diverse body of poems and essays make serious commentary on the role humans play in the previous and current destruction of the natural environment. Her deep love of nature and the outdoors works in tandem with the personal memories she incorporates into her work, creating a closeness that inspires the reader to reflect on their relationship to nature. Besides her own memories and encounters, Deming also uses many forms of “cultural memory” to create a wider human experience out of taking responsibility for environmental deterioration. Cultural memory can be common story, or an institution like religion or gender dynamics, or facts from the scientific community; any idea that is a part of civilization that is connected to the human experience. Deming’s connecting and comparing those familiar pieces of cultural memory to the larger theme of nature and climate change help her convince the audience of nature’s role as an example of cultural memory, one that is disappearing and must be preserved by art. The end goal of her efforts and writing seems to be returning humanity to its place within nature, not above it, thus making our actions of more consequence and heightening our responsibility as fellow members of the environment.Specimens Gathered at a Clear Cut Analysis:
Deming writes a poem in the form of a scientific analysis based on the objects she finds while walking through a clear cut. The blend of beautiful, poetic language with the analytical, data based language pulls together the two ways humans seem to be interpreting our relationship to nature; one of use versus one of appreciation. Additionally, her accounts of the remains of trees and litter in the area give a warning to audiences about what happens to a setting after it has been exhausted by human greed. That distinction shows the imbalance between the dominant human and submissive nature in our Anthropocene world, but she brings them back together with imagery of nature that seems to inspire human culture, as well as her account of being felled by a tree stump. The hope she describes at the end of the poem: “Forest time makes everything round, everything broken, a story of the whole,” brings the two entities back together for a brighter future when humanity learns for our environmental mistakes and the land is replenished.
Wild Woman of the Woods Analysis:
From Deming’s anthology Genius Loci, “Wild Woman of the Woods” is a prime example of her use of present institutions connecting to powerful imagery of the natural environment, bringing the human of the poem back to nature and nature back to the human, putting humanity and nature on equal planes. The poem opens with the female speaker desiring that the vines of the trees grow around her and she becomes one with the woods, with “…I want to be no more safe, no more damaging, than creatures, to be their equal.” That line fulfills Deming’s Anthropocene idea that humans need to view nature as an equal. While this poem does not mention pollution or human effects on the environment, besides “..barbed wire’s slow one [insult]…” (suggesting the fencing in of a wooded area), the speaker does note, in the third stanza, how life in suburbia was toxic and unfulfilling. She became happier when she lost herself in the truth of the earth and the truth about herself; the woods. The poem ends with, “One day I got lost in a fog so thick I could no longer tell where my body ended and the space surrounding it began.” This idea of a woman leaving the confines of suburban life to find her true self speaks to the cultural memory of feminist dialogue, and Deming’s speaking finding herself in nature reaffirms the Anthropocene messages of nature rejoining humanity.
Genius Loci Analysis:
Deming’s poem “Genius Loci” from her anthology of the same name might not call a great amount of attention to human impact on the environment, it is a fine example of how she uses cultural memory to impact the audience. She has several titles sections, such as Return, River, Horologue, Assembly of the Gods at Olympus, Tycho Brahe’s Nose, Terezín, and Worship, as well as excerpts of children’s poetry from a Jewish Ghetto of Nazi Germany. Those titles and the poetry beneath them illuminate parts of human history, culture, the institutions of religion, and the concept of time are all part of the greater story that makes us human. Deming uses these examples to make a point about what memories need to be preserved by humanity because they are important to our identity.
The Naturalists:
The first poem to appear in Deming’s anthology Genius Loci, “The Naturalists,” is a smaller, simple example of the use of nature imagery and the idea of preserving memory. The poem describes a group of naturalists working in the field who find beauty when analyzing a sample of scat or squinting at tiny flowers. It reads, “…Biscuitroot, buffalo gourd, cryptograms to them are hints of genetic memory fossilized in their brains, and ancient music they try to recall because, although they cannot quite hear the tune, they know if they could sing it that even their own wild rage and lust and death terrors about seem as beautiful as the endolithic algae…” Deming is saying that the beautiful memory is somewhere locked in the nature that we study, and it is our job to find it because it is in nature that we may find the truth of our wildest feelings.
The Definition of a Disaster:
Deming’s long-form poem from her anthology Rope examines the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the diverse human population and the surrounding environment. The sectioned content, some taken from NPR reports of the scene, describe the bodies, the surging water, the sewage, who to blame, and vivid imagery of the destruction. It mentions institutions of a cold, distant government, (Give the year-old computer model of the flood to the president.”), religion, (“The president said we are the ark…”), and racism (…Old Jim Crow was a merry old soul,”). Those ideas, as well as the history of the horrific storm, have become cultural memory. We now know that the poor and disadvantaged suffer the most in a natural disaster, the government has to take action if we are to change our behavior to combat climate change, and we must be able to do more than just pray and Act of God does not destroy us. The fact that Katrina had to become such a powerful cultural memory is what makes Deming;s Anthropocene art so powerful. The final stanza of the poem is titled, “The Storm.” It reads; “Not governed by hostility or disappointment. The storm is innocent – Not governed by prayer or judgement. The storm winds up like a toy – Not governed by committee or president. The storm plays its war until it’s tired and goes to sleep.” The storm cannot be blamed for its wild behavior. It was doing what a storm, what nature, does. We were not prepared. We did not respect the power of nature’s wrath and we suffered for it. Alison Hawthorne Deming’s poem is a monument for all that was lost in the storm, and a warning for those alive for the next.
Rope:
The titular work of Alison Hawthorne Deming’s anthology Rope uses rope and fishing imagery and analogy to illustrate the Anthropocene’s fragile state and how nature and man must come together to survive. Both the man and the rope are worn and tired, and the rope is starting to fray and break, “…fiber by fiber, like the glacial ice…” (A quick call to the effects of climate change). The man wishes there was a way to repair it, but instead it will lay, fragile and unused while the man “wishes he could save one strand of the world from unravelling.” Deming’s thoughts are that the strands of the rope are science and art, the creative and practical subjects that hold that unite the world. That imagery illustrates the message Deming’s hopes to preach; that humanity, the environment, art, and science must be on the same plane to foster an environment of awareness, activism, and hope for the future.
Laurel Blossom’s review of Deming’s work “Rope,” elaborates on Deming’s thoughts on the Anthropocene in that collection of writing. Blossom cites a podcast featuring Deming’s thoughts on “rope” and the frequent rope imagery in the work. The imagery involves “the fibers of nature and human culture, or, in a more hopeful mode, science and art, which make up the rope that binds this world together.” That is a beautiful statement that summarizes Deming’s thoughts as an Anthropocene writer; The environment, humanity, science, and art must be on the same plane to foster an ideology of awareness, activism, and hope for the future.
Works Cited:
Blossom, Laurel. “Alison Hawthorne Deming.” Pleiades. Vol. 31 no. 1. March 2011. pp 183-186. EBSCOhost, libproxy.xu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=62797009&site=eds-live&scope=site
Buntin, Simmons B. “A More Encompassing View of Human Flourishing.” Interviews. Issue 26. September 22, 2010. https://www.terrain.org/2010/interviews/alison-hawthorne-deming/
Deming, Alison Hawthorne. “Bio.” Accessed Nov. 3, 2017. http://alisonhawthornedeming.com/
Deming, Alison Hawthorne. Rope. Penguin Press, 2009. “The Definition of a Disaster.” pgs 13-19. “Rope.” pg 39. “Pandora on Prozac.” pgs 34-35.
Deming, Alison Hawthorne. Genius Loci. Penguin Press, 2005. “Wild Woman of the Woods.” pgs. 14-15. “Genius Loci.” pgs. 77-87. “The Naturalists.” pg. 3
Deming, Alison Hawthorne. “The Future of Environmental Discourse.” Terrain.org 2008.
https://www.terrain.org/articles/22/essay/deming.htm
Fischer-Wirth, Ann; Street, Laura-Gray. “The Ecopoetry Anthology.” Trinity University Press, 2013. “Specimens Gathered at the Clear Cut- Alison Hawthorne Deming.” pp. 226-227.
Heartney, Eleanor. “Art for the Anthropocene Era.” Art in America. February 6, 2014. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/art-for-the-anthropocene-era/
Keillor, Garrison. “Urban Law.” The Writer’s Almanac. National Public Radio. January 2, 2006.
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/author.php?auth_id=1507
Rappaport, Robert. “Alison Hawthorne Deming.” National Public Radio. Arizona Public Media. May 1, 2010.
https://radio.azpm.org/s/369-alison-hawthorne-deming/
