Understanding Amy: scholar Willard Spiegelman on his biography of poet Amy Clampitt

May 11, 2023 7:00 pm • Last Updated: May 12, 2023 5:34 am

By Rick Koster
Day Arts/Features writer

Willard Spiegelman (Miriam Berkley)

As he nears the end of a series of author events, podcasts, lectures and other publicity obligations associated with the publication of a new book, Willard Spiegelman is tired but happy — and looking forward to an appearance Sunday in the Stonington Free Library.

Indeed, Spiegelman, out in support of a new biography from Knopf called “Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt,” splits his time between New York City and Stonington Borough, and Sunday’s reading is a nice way to conclude the heavy lifting of a book tour.

Clampitt (1920-1994) is an attractive subject for many reasons beyond her always lushly creative, frequently polarizing poetry. Born into a Quaker family in Iowa, she moved to New York City out of college and immersed herself in a multi-faceted life of political activism, supporting herself with jobs at Oxford University Press and the National Audubon Society.

She also spent years writing poetry without success until the New Yorker published Clampitt’s first poem in 1978 — when she was 58. Five years later, her first collection, “The Kingfisher,” was published and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award (which, intriguingly, was won after contentious debate by Stonington’s James Merrill for his epic “The Changing Light at Sandover”).

For the next decade, and over the course of four more collections, Clampitt became a literary star — which was how she came to the attention of Spiegelman in his capacity as a scholar who became a big fan.

“Like everyone, I saw the first poems in The New Yorker and elsewhere. And was astonished,” Spiegelman says. “Poems like this had never appeared on the scene. She was a complete unknown, arriving from a foreign planet, or sprung like Athena from the head of Zeus.”

“Nothing Stays Put” is not Spiegelman’s first book project about Clampitt. In 2007, he edited “Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt.” In fact, it was that effort that ultimately resulted in “Nothing Stays Put.”

Based on the collection of letters, Spiegelman explains, “I was asked by Ann Close, a senior editor at Knopf, and Amy’s editor there, on behalf of the Clampitt Trust, whether I might be interested in doing a bio. I wrote a proposal. Ann presented it to Sonny Mehta, the late, longtime head of Knopf. He accepted it eagerly, and on I went … it was a labor of love.”

It’s fair to say “Nothing Stays Put” is a work that fits in the sweet spot between analytic scholarship and a compelling readability — which is perhaps not surprising.

On one hand, Spiegelman is the author of 11 highly regarded books of literary criticism and personal essays, writes about literature and art for The Wall Street Journal, was the longtime editor of the Southwest Review and was for many years the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Too, he’s a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Bogliasco Foundations.

It’s also true Spiegelman — as per his essay collections “Senior Moments: Looking Back, Looking Ahead” and “If You See Something, Say Something: A Writer Looks at Art” — is a wry observer whose critical tendencies coexist with a sense of joy and adventure.

These traits meld magnificently in “Nothing Stays Put,” which has garnered strongly positive reviews. And Spiegelman, emailing from a variety of tour situations ranging from a train bound for Philadelphia to the bar in the Algonquin Hotel, answered questions about his new book. Responses have been edited for space and clarity.

Q: You have suggested that poems are the writer’s best biography. But, in “Nothing Stays Put,” you also describe how Clampitt didn’t want to share herself and personal life in her poetry. How did you reconcile this apparent contradiction in the book?

A: A writer's life may be reflected in her work, but the work can never be reduced to the life. They are complementary things. A life is necessary, but never sufficient, to explain the mysterious processes of art.

In her life, Clampitt told her friends and family things about herself, but she also withheld plenty of information. Her youngest brother — now 93 — told me that when he read my book he learned things about his sister he never knew.

Everyone's life is a mystery, and nothing can touch the inexplicable depths in any person's being.

Q: Is it a fair assessment that Clampitt’s work was stylistically out of step with what was happening in real-time poetry? Did she find inspiration (and develop her own voice) through the works of poets who were long out of favor?

A: Clampitt was resolutely 180 degrees apart from the governing styles of the 1980s. She refused to write in "plain diction." She relished mouth-watering, polysyllabic words. Keats and Gerard Manley Hopkins were her first loves (along with Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poster child for certain feelings and styles in the 1920s).

Like Marianne Moore, she believed in bringing her book learning (including science) into her poems. She hated the idea of "confessional" poetry, or poetry as simple cries of passion. A poem is a made thing. And what it is made of is WORDS. She loved words. Lots of them.

Most of all, she is the only poet I can think of who neatly combines the two major original strands of American poetry, one coming from Emily Dickinson, and the other from Walt Whitman. (To understand what I mean, I suggest reading my book.)

Early readers took to her because she made them aware that they were hungry for something that didn't exist at the time.

Q: Can you give an example of something you learned about her life/career that surprised you and added context in ways you wouldn’t have gleaned otherwise?

A: We know that Amy was committing herself to the Episcopal church in the mid- to late fifties. But a decade later she left the Church, for several reasons. First, she realized that women were not begin granted full membership in the clergy (nowadays, of course, they are). The priests would allow her to polish the silver and arrange the flowers, but she would never be permitted to be part of the "establishment" unless she became a nun. Second, her political energies had begun to overtake and replace her spiritual commitments, and she was throwing herself with what can only be called "religious" fervor into anti-Vietnam war protest.

But most of all, owing to her attachment to Harold Korn, her law professor partner, whose mother's family was killed by the Nazis in the camps, she came to realize that Christianity contains, at its very heart, in the New Testament, a firm anti-Semitism that has persisted for centuries. So, although she held on to the arts of Christianity — music, pictures, sculpture, stained glass, and poetry — she tossed out the theology. She remained a committed Quaker pacifist for her entire life, but she would not accept conventional religious dogmas. Deeds, not creeds, were what she wanted.

Q: It seems to many that the attention span and focus of many young persons has quantifiably shortened by the speedy demands of social media. In one way, the shorter form of poetry might benefit from this; in another, do you as a critic and professor fear for the future of the literature?

A: As to tastes, etc., I have been hawking my wares, hoping that my book succeeds, NOT for my sake, but for the sake of my subject. Students, even (or especially) young poets, know no one or nothing from before five years ago. Clampitt — like Merrill, Richard Wilbur Robert Lowell, even Wallace Stevens and W.B. Yeats — is seldom taught. I want to introduce her to new audiences.