I Wanted the Impossible 

In the prologue of Nothing Stays Put (Knopf, 2023), his lush, learned biography of Amy Clampitt, the scholar and editor Willard Spiegelman tells of his astonishment and confusion upon reading “The Kingfisher” in the New Yorker in 1982. The poem, arguably Clampitt’s best known, recounts a haunting love affair. The “frantic” birdsong of an “insomniac nightingale” runs like a leitmotif through seven orderly stanzas, nearly displacing the memories of a lover pursued 30 years before:

In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then
dead silence) later, she could not have said how many
spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden,
how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one
insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down
screaming in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery;
 
a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color
of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow
through landscapes of untended memory: ardor
illuminating with its terrifying currency
now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista
but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow.

Poetry readers, Spiegelman included, “scratched their heads and asked, ‘Where did this come from? Who is this person?’ No poems like these had appeared on the scene in quite some time, if ever.” Clampitt, Spiegelman writes, “brought extravagance and flamboyance back into fashion” with her “polysyllabic explosions.” She also brought back discretion. “The Kingfisher” is personal without being confessional, simultaneously concealing and revealing. Clampitt uses romantic motifs to devastatingly modern effect: the rhyme of arrow and sorrow in the last stanza, the image of Hopkins’s kingfisher catching fire as it burns through the woman’s “untended memory,” the final admission of a loneliness that offers no romantic consolation. Clampitt gives almost nothing away, yet the poem thrums with pain and erotic intensity.

“She had no sympathy,” Spiegelman tells us, “for people who paraded their inner misfortunes.” Clampitt’s dismissive attitude toward the self-indulgences of confessional verse, which commanded so much attention in the 1960s and 1970s, was a product, he writes, of “her stern midwestern upbringing.” And her models: Hopkins, Keats, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Millay, Swinburne. Clampitt returned to their lives again and again in her work, and their echoes sound in “The Kingfisher.” But T.S. Eliot also haunts the poem: memory and desire, European landscapes, breakdown, and even the nightingale recall The Waste Land. Clampitt knew it all. In 1956, she told her brother Philip that she could write a history of English literature from memory “and know just where to place everybody in it, with hardly any trouble at all. The reason being, apparently, that I feel I am in it.” Spiegelman notes the boldness of this claim, especially for a woman writer who did not publish her first poem until 1978.

Clampitt was born in 1920 and grew up in a Quaker family in the tiny town of New Providence, Iowa. Her mother was a homemaker, her father a farmer with a classics degree from Grinnell. He taught Clampitt the Greek alphabet when she was seven, and she began writing poems and painting at age nine. Her best memories were of afternoons spent reading alone. A self-identified “misfit” in high school, she attended Grinnell and graduated Phi Beta Kappa (like her father) in 1941. But Clampitt had no desire to stay in the Midwest. She later told the Paris Review that life there did not seem “authentic” to her because “everything was derived from somewhere else.” Iowa itself was “in the middle” and she wanted to get to “edges and coastlines.” Her search for originality took her to Europe, where she traveled widely and developed a strong attachment to England and Greece. In those places especially, Clampitt said, “I believed that the past could be experienced as the present.”

After graduating from Grinnell, she moved to Manhattan, first to Morningside Heights, and then, in 1943, to an apartment on West 12th Street where she remained for the next 30 years. Clampitt had won a fellowship to a master’s program in literature at Columbia that began in the fall of 1941, but she dropped out before the year ended. Spiegelman writes that she left because she was “dispirited,” though one wonders if there is more to this story. Why would a hard-working Midwestern woman hungry for intellectual stimulation turn down such a prestigious fellowship? Howard Moss, who was on the same course and eventually became a famed poetry editor at the New Yorker, told Spiegelman that the faculty was “entirely uncongenial.” Grumpy professors hardly seem reason enough for Clampitt to quit, given the rarity of such gilded academic opportunities for women.

She found work as a secretary at the New York City offices of the Oxford University Press, rising through the ranks until she left in 1951, when she took up a position as a reference librarian at the National Audubon Society on Fifth Avenue. (She also wrote reviews for Audubon magazine.) After seven years, she tired of this position and struck out on her own as a freelance editor. Throughout this time, she wrote novels and travel books, all rejected by publishers. Spiegelman notes the existence of two full coming-of-age novels set in Iowa and “dozens” of stories in Clampitt’s papers. He says Clampitt “had trouble with any narrative longer than a stand-alone vignette” but that the novels contain fine descriptive passages that “foretell the poet-to-be.” Clampitt also outlined two other novels, one set in England, the other in New York, about a young woman who attempts suicide after being seduced by a married man. (One wonders if this story has something to do with Clampitt’s real-life decision to give up her Columbia fellowship.) She told a potential publisher that the New York novel was written “upon the literary tradition of Hawthorne and Henry James. It is to be first and last a love story—not of sex, avarice or dependence in love’s clothing, but of love as the search for spiritual reality.” After rejections from 10 major publishers, she wrote to her father in 1954, “I prefer an honorable failure to a meaningless success, but I haven’t given up yet.” She kept at it, driven by a stubborn sense of vocation. “A writer is what I was meant to be,” she wrote to her brother. Spiegelman sees such determination as a key to her success. “She was making herself a writer by constantly writing … steadfastly proving it, if to no one but herself.” She suffered from periodic depressions, which Spiegelman suggests she inherited from her paternal side, but she resisted psychotherapy. She felt that inner turmoil was not to be taken as seriously as poverty and its cascade of hardships. Clampitt’s younger sister, Beth, was institutionalized for schizophrenia and had a partial lobotomy, though Spiegelman is curiously reticent about the impact of all this on Clampitt.

Early in the biography, Spiegelman describes Clampitt as looking “eccentric, but also as inviting and comfortable as a tea cosy.” This grandmotherly description may have been true enough when Clampitt was in her 70s, but it doesn’t square with a 1965 photograph that shows her chatting in the sun with two young men on a ship to Greece, to which she traveled alone. With her stylish purse, sunglasses, and chin-length bob, she looks the height of fashion at age 45. On the ship, she often partied until 3:00 am, dancing to a Greek band. (The morning they neared Greece, she asked a steward to wake her at 5:00 am so she could see the first Greek islands as they emerged on the horizon.) There were other overseas trips during these years, to Britain and the Continent. There were love affairs. Spiegelman writes that she lived her life “as a character in a narrative of her own creation … a heroine in search of a hero and a story.”  

Clampitt experienced a religious epiphany in 1956 as she stood before the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters museum in northern Manhattan. “If baptism it was,” she wrote her brother, “it wasn’t of water, but of light.” She once said of herself, “I don’t do things by halves,” and Spiegelman notes that she came to the church “fully equipped as an aesthete and an intellectual. She is reading Dante. She listens to masses and other religious compositions. She has discussions with English friends about the differences between Catholicism and Anglicanism.” By November 1956, she was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. She attended services at St. Luke in the Fields, in the West Village, where she formed close friendships with three young nuns. But she left the church in 1971, frustrated by its lack of commitment to the antiwar and women’s liberation movements.

Searching for community, she became a secular evangelist for the welfare and housing rights movement of the 1970s. At protests in New York City, she was arrested and jailed three times, once with Grace Paley. She marched in Washington against the IRS and the Vietnam War. She tried to persuade a Quaker organization to send her to Vietnam, presumably to do charity work, but they felt she was “too unstable” for such a trip. During an antiwar protest in 1971, she was asked to write her occupation on a banner. She found the courage to call herself “Poet,” even though she had never published a poem.

That was about to change. Clampitt had been writing more poetry than fiction since her 1965 trip to Greece. A poetry class with Daniel Gabriel at the New School in 1977 crystallized her newfound commitment to verse. By this time, she was living uptown with the law professor Harold (Hal) Korn, a close college friend of Harold Bloom’s. She had met Korn in the spring of 1968, and they quickly became a couple. Though the partnership was not without complications—Korn’s jealousy over Clampitt’s 1992 MacArthur Fellowship led to a “temporary rift”—Spiegelman argues that living with Hal “increased her self-confidence, and standing up for political justice had evidently increased her courage.” She began “writing great quantities” in Gabriel’s class and reading her poetry at open mic events in Manhattan.

In 1978, John (Jack) Macrae, one of Clampitt’s freelance clients and the president of the E. P. Dutton publishing company, asked to read some of her fiction and poetry. Macrae was underwhelmed by her fiction but thought her poems were good—very good. Without her knowledge, he sent “The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews” to Howard Moss at the New Yorker. The poem is set in Maine, where Clampitt and Korn spent summers:

An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lined and shaped like a teacup.
                                           A step
down and you’re into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted
understory …
 
…
 
                                 But the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in the cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.

Spiegelman notes the poem’s “measured music,” its “modest, almost offhand philosophical inquiry into the nature of creation.” It appeared in the magazine that March. She was 58 years old. This was the beginning of Clampitt’s literary career. She published five volumes with Knopf over the next decade, befriended Howard Moss, won Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, accepted prestigious visiting writer positions at Amherst and Smith, and appeared at black-tie literary events with the likes of Seamus Heaney. She read her poetry at the Harvard Commencement in 1987.

Clampitt’s literary verse endeared her to critics such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, whose promotion of her work in the 1980s and 1990s helped propel her to poetic stardom. But not everyone was convinced. Clampitt had influential detractors who found her writing nearly as indulgent as bad confessionalism: pretentious, wordy, overly allusive, syntactically dense, at times nonsensical. Mary Karr wrote that Clampitt’s poetry was “a parody of the Victorian silk that Pound sought to unravel … Swinburne on acid or Tennyson gone mad with his thesaurus.” Spiegelman, judicious but squarely on the side of Bloom and Vendler, believes that some of this “downright nasty” criticism stemmed from sexism directed toward a woman in her 60s who has just arrived. Clampitt told a friend that these negative reviews—which began appearing after the publication of her second collection, What the Light Was Like (1985)—were easier for her to accept than “Helen Vendler’s four pages in the New York Review, which threw me into a state of depression nobody thought I was quite entitled to.” She continued, “I thought I was going to be a person who spent her life in obscurity, and this came. It jolted me. I wasn’t ready to have people know about me.”

She grew in confidence the more she published and the more she taught. Her students remembered her as a good listener, always interested in what they had to say. At the height of her fame, she stopped judging poetry contests; the role of gatekeeper made her uncomfortable. She felt, Spiegelman writes, “incredulity rather than entitlement” about her exalted position, and she continued to accept nearly every invitation to speak or teach—even when she was battling ovarian cancer in the early 1990s. She died at her home near Lenox, Massachusetts, which she shared with Korn, in 1994. He left the house to future writers through the Amy Clampitt Writing Residency.

One of the pleasures of this biography is watching Spiegelman, who edited Clampitt’s Selected Letters (2004), keep pace with his subject’s roving, hungry mind. His insistence upon treating Clampitt as the curious and generous intellectual she was is commendable and refreshing, even if he sometimes shows blind spots about her experience as a woman writer. At one point, Spiegelman mocks a sex scene in one of Clampitt’s failed novels, which he says reads like “an adolescent’s attempt to imitate D.H. Lawrence.” But this scene contains an undercurrent of rape, not seduction: the woman is summarily “deflowered” by her date before she understands what is taking place. Afterward, the man apologizes to her (“I didn’t mean for it to happen”) as she cries silently. The vignette is disturbing yet bold in its indictment of sexual power dynamics at midcentury. Many women readers, especially of Clampitt’s era, would have identified with this female character’s silent rage.

Nor do we learn much about Clampitt’s attitude toward the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s or her thoughts about prominent American women poets such as Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, whose work was everywhere at exactly the time Clampitt committed herself to poetry. Spiegelman notes that Clampitt admired Ariel (1965), though he presents her work as antithetical to the confessional movement. Presumably her impersonal, allusive style drew Vendler’s and Bloom’s admiration. They saw in her poetry an antidote to what they considered the excesses and didacticism of Rich and Sexton (and in Bloom’s case, Plath).

Spiegelman is otherwise excellently attuned to Clampitt’s intellectual life and ambitions (“Books called to her, and she responded”); her modest, thrifty character; her identification with the underdog; her unsung political activism; and her joie de vivre. Though he points out the limits of biography—“An artist’s life is necessary, but never sufficient, to explain her art”—one comes away from this book moved and inspired. Spiegelman’s prose is elegant and understated, and his research quietly impressive. He is particularly good at distilling Clampitt’s literary and philosophical sensibilities—how she mingled “Keatsian lushness and Quaker austerity” in her life and work. Commenting upon her diaries, he writes, “One gets a sense of a woman who is ready for anything but unsure of everything. She is hungry for experience, bold and timid simultaneously.” He compares her “expansive, even undiscriminating eye” to Whitman’s: “Like him, she is ‘large,’ and ‘contains multitudes.’” Spiegelman’s close readings of Clampitt’s poems, too, are always illuminating. Discussing her poem “Fog,” he notes how the poem is “proof that loss might encourage sensuous richness, with the audible and the visible coming together in ravishing synesthetic images”:

A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands’ spruce-tips
drunk up like milk in the
universal emulsion; houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite,
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean.
 
…
 
                                Opacity
opens up rooms, a showcase
for the hueless moonflower
corolla, as Georgia
O’Keeffe might have seen it,
of foghorns; the nodding
campanula of bell buoys;
the ticking, linear
filigree of bird voices.

Clampitt is lucky to have the attention of such a sympathetic, literary biographer.

One guesses she also would have appreciated Spiegelman’s discretion. We never learn the identity of a stunningly beautiful man whose photographs she saved or the lovers she alludes to, fleetingly, in her diary. “Clampitt’s amatory life remains unknowable,” Spiegelman writes. “So much has been irretrievably lost.” Where another biographer may have spent weeks, months, or even years tracking down these men’s identities, Spiegelman does not intrude. Clampitt—a self-proclaimed “prude” who once thought about becoming a nun—may not have wanted such details shared.

Still, the hole at the center of Clampitt’s erotic life—that “uninhabitable sorrow” she alludes to in “The Kingfisher”—invites speculation. She was bookish, yes, but her poems, diary entries, and letters hint at what Spiegelman calls a profound sexual “vibrancy.” In her diary, Clampitt writes of lying in bed, remembering times with a former lover, “scene by scene”—the feel of his tweed jacket, his fingers on her wrist. “I wanted a great romance,” she wrote to her brother, “I wanted to know what it felt like to be tragic; I wanted the impossible. And the extraordinary thing is that without calculating in the least, I got it. I got two big romances, plus a number of small interludes that were in various degrees exciting, amusing and painful, plus a couple of more extended involvements that were none of these and were the hardest to get out of.” She never wanted children and was reluctant to surrender her hard-won independence to a man. (Note that get out of.) Before she met Hal Korn, she said she sought out “unsuitable” and married men who would not pressure her to commit. Sometimes she wavered. In 1949, she nearly surrendered everything to an Englishman at Oxford, the unnamed lover in “The Kingfisher”: “I basked in the luxury of being admired in a new way that seemed at moments worth giving up independence [and] all my shining book-culture for.” She met Korn when she was nearly 50 and stayed with him for 26 years, but she did not marry him until three months before her death. Friends remembered her romantic interest in younger men when she was in her 70s. Clampitt is known as a nature poet, a book poet, but she was also a love poet: a quixotic intensity lies at the heart of some of her most memorable verse. Travel, reading, writing, and men subdued her wanderlust. As she wrote in her poem “Nothing Stays Put”—a fitting title for this biography—“All that we know, that we’re / made of, is motion.”