Ever Inward

“Excuse the long-winded ecstasy,” Amy Clampitt wrote to her family from a trip to Greece in 1965, “but that is why I came here, to see and exclaim.” About to turn forty-five, Clampitt had tried writing fiction, tinkering with a series of novels for decades. She’d tried travel writing, also to no avail. (Upon returning from Greece, she sent 165 pages on her peregrinations to several publishers. No one bit.) She wouldn’t make the final shift to poetry for a while yet, and it would be thirteen years before she published her first poem in The New Yorker. Yet in her letter Clampitt, one of the great late successes among American poets, identified the kind of writer she would eventually become. In her poems, “long-windedness”—or, more precisely, a love of linguistic profusion, of words that preen and sentences that refuse to end—grew into an achieved style.

Throughout her life, Clampitt gorged herself on sensory details. “A barnacle is what I sometimes think I really am, seizing on any passing thing that may be tempting,” she wrote in a 1985 letter, two years after her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher, was published. She was borrowing from her own poem “Cloudberry Summer,” in which she describes how

                        the wavering
appendage of a single barnacle
is multiplied, on observation, to a kind of choir
(what are they doing? Merely
seizing any passing thing that may be
edible).

Clampitt exercised this acquisitiveness partly with regard to other writers. She loved John Keats and even wrote a sequence of poems about his life, and she admired Elizabeth Bishop. Both poets can be heard in “Cloudberry Summer”—Keats in the vigorous verb “seizing” (“What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth”), Bishop in the use of clarifying parentheticals.

Among their many gifts, Keats and Bishop had greedy eyes. Clampitt did, too; when she was young and living in New Providence, Iowa, she dreamed of becoming a painter, and her later poems remember the visual texture of this “prairie childhood,” with its

                  immigrant grasses,
their massive corduroy, their wavering feltings embroidered
here and there by the scarlet shoulder patch of cannas
on a courthouse lawn.

Clampitt took in a variety of landscapes over the course of her life. She moved to New York City in 1941 and lived there for more than fifty years. She traveled to England in 1949 after winning an Oxford University Press essay contest and to France, Italy, and Austria in 1951. After receiving a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1992, she bought a house in the Berkshires. For the last two decades of her life, she spent a month or so each summer on the coast of Maine. But no matter where she was, she found the dynamism of the natural world—light on the oceans and light on the prairies, birds flying and alders spreading—visually irresistible. From The Kingfisher, published when she was sixty-two, to A Silence Opens, her fifth and final collection, published when she was seventy-three and dying of cancer, Clampitt turned all this visual “glut/run riot” into poetry.

Clampitt’s poems often dramatize the seemingly static act of sustained observation. Take the first sentence of “The Field Pansy,” twenty-three and a half lines documenting a single instance of looking at a violet. It begins:

Yesterday, just before the first frost of the season,
I discovered a violet in bloom on the lawn—a white one,
with a mesh of faint purple pencil marks above the hollow
at the throat, where the petals join.

By Clampitt’s rhapsodic standards, this opening is conversational. Yet even here there is music: the dance of consonants in “before,” “first,” and “frost”; the lilting of “violet,” “bloom,” and “lawn”; the alliterations in “mesh of faint purple pencil marks.” This sonic playfulness might strike us as a distraction from the scene itself, but for Clampitt, artifice actually strengthens a poem’s claim on reality. As she asks elsewhere, “What is real except/what’s fabricated?”

In “The Field Pansy,” the act of looking is not limited to a single moment. Noticing this flower leads the speaker to consider flowers she has noticed elsewhere and at other times. She notes that the violet is “out of sync with the ubiquity of the asters of New England,//or indeed with the johnny-jump-ups I stopped to look at,/last week, in a plot by the sidewalk.” But there’s more: the johnny-jump-ups that she looked at are descended from “the bi- or tri-colored native field pansy of Europe,” which is itself “ancestor of the cloned ocher and aubergine, the cream-white,//the masked motley, the immaculate lilac-blue of the pansies/that thrive in the tended winter plots of tidewater Virginia,” which are themselves “a link with what, among the hollows of the/great dunes of Holland, out of reach of the slide and hurl/of the North Sea breakers, I found growing a summer ago.” This long first sentence, which began the day before in New England, ends with the image, from the previous summer in Europe, of a

field pansy tinged not violet but pink, sometimes approaching
the hue of the bell of a foxglove: a gathering, a proliferation

on a scale that, for all its unobtrusiveness, seems to be
worldwide, of what I don’t know how to read except as an
urge to give pleasure: a scale that may, for all our fazed
dubiety, indeed be universal.

Unobtrusively, without losing its syntactic sense (Clampitt deploys six colons in this opening sentence alone), the poem collects and layers flowers, colors, geographies, and memories. This is the kind of sentence that Clampitt’s pleasure-giving world, with its “gushing insouciance” and “infinite particularity,” demands. The too-muchness of her writing attempts to match the too-muchness of existence. (As Clampitt acknowledged, all such attempts must fail: “I know I’m leaving something out/when I write of this omnipresence of something like eagerness.”)

“The Field Pansy” is, to use its own language, a “gathering.” Clampitt, who was raised as a Quaker, loved that word. In another poem she describes the shallow but intricate root system of the spruce as “a gathering in one continuous,/meshing intimacy, the interlace/of unrelated fibers/joining hands like last survivors.” She knew, even in that letter from Greece, that her gift lay in the ecstatic collection of images. It just took her a while to discover the right form for them.

The lateness of this discovery is one of several sustaining mysteries in Willard Spiegelman’s Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt. Spiegelman, a longtime critic and editor of the Southwest Review but a first-time biographer, describes Clampitt as “one of the Patron Saints of Late Bloomers.” It’s nice to be a saint of any sort, though a late start isn’t a fate most would wish for. Literary culture, revealing the long afterlife of Romanticism, continues to be obsessed with precocity: far better to be the young upstart than the wizened latecomer.

Born in 1920, Clampitt grew up in a bookish Iowa home. Her grandfather, a farmer, privately published a memoir that spoke of his life as a reader (Emerson and Longfellow were favorites) and as a would-be poet: “I later practiced composing sonnets as I guided my plow through the long stretches of prairie sod.” Her father also was a farmer; he, too, wrote an autobiography, his with the melancholic title A Life I Did Not Plan. During the cold Iowa winters Clampitt read Dickens to her brother in the furnace-warmed basement. She moved to New York City after graduating from Grinnell and attended “some sort of master’s degree program in literature” at Columbia, Spiegelman reports, before dropping out “after one or possibly two terms.”

This hedging is typical of Spiegelman’s careful approach. His subject “seems to have saved everything,” from diaries to drafts to letters, yet the documents occlude as much as they reveal. Spiegelman writes that Clampitt “was often daring in her life, but never in her recording of it.” In “The Kingfisher,” the title poem of her first collection, Clampitt conjures the end of a romantic relationship. “Friends say this was Clampitt’s story,” Spiegelman notes, but she approaches it indirectly. She describes a “late thrush” out of Hardy, “berry-/eyed, bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma/in the stigmata of all its underparts”; she notes a “kingfisher,” borrowed from Hopkins, with its “burnished plunge, the color/of felicity afire.” “It is a confessional poem masquerading as an objective third-person narrative,” Spiegelman writes, “with birds rather than people as the central characters.”

Spiegelman is the first to consider Clampitt’s life at book length, and he relies in part on interviews with her family, friends, and coworkers. Most who knew Clampitt commented on her childlike enthusiasm—her longtime partner and eventual husband, the Columbia law professor Harold Korn, once described her as “sixty going on three”—yet her friends also recognized her innate reserve: “She would tell you what she wanted you to know, and the rest of her life was just a closed book.” This strange blend of exuberance and reticence can be seen in her poems, too, which court verbosity but also regularly move toward an austerity that shades into blankness—imagining grace, for example, as

the unction
of sheer nonexistence
upwelling in this
hyacinthine freshet
of the unnamed
the faceless.

Clampitt’s restraint, coupled with her relatively quiet life—she worked for decades as an editor and then as a reference librarian while trying to write—means that, even for the diligent biographer, secrets remain. Spiegelman knows about the existence, though not the nature, of her several romantic relationships before she met Korn when they were both volunteers with the Village Independent Democrats in 1968. (Clampitt was arrested at least three times for protesting New York City housing policy.) He can only speculate as to why she had poems by Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Hopkins read at her funeral but vehemently refused to include her beloved Keats. These opacities present a methodological challenge for Spiegelman; the modal verbs “must,” “would,” and “might” do a lot of work.

He divides his book into three major parts—“Iowa,” “Obscurity,” and “Fame”—and weaves Clampitt’s writing throughout, claiming that her admittedly oblique “self-presentations in poems and prose constitute a quite credible autobiography.” He doesn’t mean that Clampitt was really a confessionalist, writing directly from and of personal experience, but rather that we can come to know her most deeply by engaging with her observations. For her, style was character, and perception an ethic. As Spiegelman declares, “The inner life—the life of the mind—is as urgent, demanding, and constitutive as the lived life.” He often notices a formal feature, such as her much-loved lists, and then uses it to consider the life: “Making a list is a way of staving off terror, of rebelling against prairie deprivations and emptiness.” In less subtle hands, the method could be reductive, but Spiegelman notes Clampitt’s style of writing, recounts her style of being, and allows the two to illuminate each other.

Despite the gaps in the biographical record, we do know that Clampitt was writing, revising, and submitting fiction for about twenty-five years. As Spiegelman notes with some regret, she long “thought that to be a serious writer meant writing fiction,” though the form demanded folding description into narrative action in a way that never came naturally to her. A friend recalls Clampitt occasionally reading “a chapter or two from her novel” at dinner parties: “And we would all leave and be shaking our heads, saying ‘Amy’s a poet.’”

In 1951 Clampitt quit her job at Oxford University Press in order to travel and write a novel. (In a later letter to her brother, she explained that she had done so because she had “a horror of turning professional”; she wanted to be a writer, not an office worker.) That didn’t pan out, and in 1952 she began as a reference librarian at the National Audubon Society, though she continued to tinker with the novel—and, eventually, multiple novels—on the side. And then in 1956 Clampitt had a conversion experience while visiting the Cloisters, in Manhattan. Looking at the Unicorn Tapestries, she “wander[ed] in and out, visually speaking, among the little wild strawberries, the bluebells and daisies and periwinkles and dozens of other flowers.” Listening to medieval music, she experienced song and world as one:

The Kyrie, which of course is a cry for mercy, and the sun on the stone, a purely physical phenomenon, seemed while I listened to have some affinity, almost to be one and the same thing.

Clampitt felt the “whole world…brimming with radiance.” “Possibly this is what is supposed to take place at baptism,” she wrote her brother, “but if baptism it was, it wasn’t of water, but of light.”

In response to this experience, as if called or compelled by something beyond her, she began writing poetry:

Quite as though they had a will of their own, the sentences broke in a way that was not my usual style at all. Rather frightened, I must admit, for the moment, I let them break. The next thing I knew, they had begun to reach out for rhymes. This frightened me almost more, until I discovered that finding a rhyme could be almost as natural a process as the resolution of a dominant chord: I didn’t have to look for them, they simply came.

Belief came—Clampitt converted to the Episcopal Church and considered becoming a nun—and belief went. She left the church in 1971, in part over what she saw as its weak position on the Vietnam War.

Her first turn to poetry hadn’t lasted, either. Three years after the Cloisters, she was back to writing fiction, again considering quitting a job, again hoping to finish a novel. In 1968, having switched back to poetry, she declared that she was “on the biggest poetry-writing binge in my history.”

Then, in 1978, The New Yorker accepted “The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews.” A remarkable debut, the poem is filled with Clampitt’s extravagant music, its “underfoot/webwork of carnivorous rubies” and “delectable/double-faced cockleburs.” It seems to look back to and reimagine her experience at the Cloisters. Now it is not God’s mercy but nature’s “ingenuity” that “unhand[s] unbelieving,” the speaker left not in a position of peace but of bewilderment: “Looking,/you start to fall upward.”

Once Clampitt found success, it piled up quickly. The Kingfisher was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Helen Vendler wrote in these pages that “a century from now, this volume will still offer a rare window into a rare mind.”^* Two years later another collection, What the Light Was Like, came out. Archaic Figure appeared in 1987, Westward in 1990, and A Silence Opens in 1994. “The poetry factory is in full gear,” she said. “It’s just cranking things out.” There were notable shifts across Clampitt’s five collections, both in style—though she could never be accused of minimalism, her later poems are sparer and stranger—and in their geographical and cultural moorings. The Kingfisher is decidedly, if not exclusively, a collection centered on “the tornado country/of mid-America” and the fog-shrouded shorelines of Maine. What the Light Was Like and Archaic Figure spend more time respectively in England (with Keats) and in Greece (with Medusa and Perseus). Westward returns to the prairies, while A Silence Opens, finished months before she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, moves toward some place beyond and past (two words repeated throughout the collection) this world.

Indeed, perhaps more interesting than Clampitt’s late beginning was how she continued to grow—and even radically change—as a poet right through her final book. Spiegelman notes that there are “wholly new things” in A Silence Opens, such as a translation of canto 9 of the Inferno and a poem, “Sed de Correr,” in which Clampitt, for the first and only time, describes her days living in Morningside Heights as a Columbia student. Her erotic energy comes across so clearly in her voluptuous descriptions of the natural world that it’s surprising, and a bit amusing, to see the naive speaker of “Sed de Correr” witnessing the sexual possibilities of New York City:

By a window
onto an airshaft one night I stood awed
at the sight of two men making love. I’d not
known how it was done.

Clampitt was a deeply and complicatedly religious poet, and A Silence Opens saw her moving into a new religious style. The Kingfisher and What the Light Was Like recall the Hopkins who saw God’s glory in the world’s profusion, while A Silence Opens echoes the Hopkins of the dark sonnets. The cataphatic, which affirms the link between creator and creation, has given way to the apophatic, a theology of silence and negation.

“Syrinx,” the first poem in Clampitt’s last collection, considers what comes after language, when breath becomes not poetry but “those last-chance vestiges/above the threshold, the all-/but dispossessed of breath.” The final poem in that same collection, “A Silence,” lacks punctuation and contains no capitalization except for its three proper nouns: Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism; George Fox, the founder of Quakerism; and God. The stanzas are skinny, with many lines consisting of only a single word. White space threatens to swallow the text as language bends toward silence.

The poem begins by gesturing to that which succeeds or exceeds human existence and articulation:

past parentage or gender
beyond sung vocables
the slipped-between
the so infinitesimal
fault line
a limitless
interiority

The speaker occupies a space of pure interiority, just as that word occupies its own line. She has moved “beyond the woven/unicorn,” an image that recalls her conversion at the Cloisters, approaching instead “a silence [that] opens.” Once, religion seemed for Clampitt a matter of seeing and singing. Now it seems to be one of silence. The stylistic filigree isn’t entirely gone; there’s alliteration to be heard and primroses to be seen. But the concluding stanza, describing the visions given to religious founders, ends with language stripped down, the words in the last five lines all monosyllables before the book’s final, expansive word:

a cavernous
compunction driving
founder-charlatans
who saw in it
the infinite
love of God
and had
(George Fox
was one)
great openings.

The most obvious reason to read Clampitt’s biography is the improbability of her career, in which not just success but good writing came very slow and then all at once. Spiegelman points to “three major supplementary pushes” that enabled her to become a mature poet. First, there was her religious experience at the Cloisters in 1956. Second, there was the “stability as well as contentment” of her relationship with Korn. Third, there was a poetry course at the New School in the fall of 1977, in which she read a number of American experimentalists, especially Charles Olson. (The title of Clampitt’s first collection alludes to Hopkins, but it also echoes Olson’s “The Kingfishers.” This poem opens with a statement that Clampitt, who believed that “nothing stays put,” surely agreed with: “What does not change/is the will to change.”) Later, Spiegelman adds a fourth prod: the modest fishing village of Corea, Maine, which Clampitt and Korn visited most summers from 1974 until her death in 1994. Mainers were as taciturn as Iowans, Corea’s water as beautiful as New Providence’s grass. “She needed to be reminded of home,” Spiegelman writes, “by something that was not home but still resembled it.”

Clampitt also needed the companionship of other poets. The young Mary Jo Salter wrote her an admiring letter in 1979, marveling that Clampitt’s poems “unfailingly send me to the dictionary at least once”; thus began a friendship that lasted for the rest of Clampitt’s life. The support of critics mattered, too, both for practical reasons—Vendler, who became a friend, helped her secure fellowships and offered feedback on her Keats sequence—and in deeper ways. When Clampitt received a few negative reviews, Vendler responded, “Those of us who love your language are not about to desert you. And those who don’t love it may love something else, and thereby save their souls in some other direction, or so I hope.” After reading Vendler’s book on Keats, Clampitt wrote to her, “Your observations about the image of poppies twined with wheat in the Autumn ode is proof to me that you’re wrong about poets not needing critics.”

There is no simple explanation for Clampitt’s late-career flourishing. She was, in her own words, “no stranger, finally, to the mystery/of what we are,” and her life, in Spiegelman’s telling of it, is a testament to the mystery of what writers are and how they become it. The second stanza of “Syrinx” begins, “Syntax comes last.” In context, the speaker means that syntax, the arrangement of words and phrases into intelligible order, comes only after we master the ability to make sound. Reading these lines in the light of Clampitt’s biography, though, one can’t help but think of how long it took her to discover the right form for her language. By the time of “Syrinx” she’d found it. The thirty-nine-line poem consists of two sentences. The poet’s “soaring/pectoral breathwork” forks this way and that, propelled by enjambment and controlled by her well-loved punctuation mark: the colon.

In this poem and elsewhere in her last collection, though, Clampitt also became interested in what comes even after syntax: when speech gives way to breath, when breath gives way to silence. Silence, perhaps especially for a poet who worked so hard and long to find her voice, is a great sorrow. For Clampitt, it is also a great opening: past the physical world she so loved, beyond the language she so savored, into a limitless interiority.