{"id":1285,"date":"2012-02-20T17:30:38","date_gmt":"2012-02-20T17:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/?p=1285"},"modified":"2022-07-09T17:59:02","modified_gmt":"2022-07-09T17:59:02","slug":"clampitt-amy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/c\/clampitt-amy\/","title":{"rendered":"Clampitt, Amy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Amy<\/a><\/p>\n

by Richard Dey<\/em> (2014)<\/p>\n

AMY CLAMPITT (1920\u20131994). Born and raised on a small farm in Iowa, this poet, who was best known for her highly cultured work, wrote a few extraordinary sea poems. Here are lines from the first:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

                                                      The ocean,
\ncumbered by no business more urgent
\nthan keeping open old accounts
\nthat never balanced,
\ngoes on shuffling its millenniums
\nof quartz, granite, and basalt.<\/p>\n

It behaves
\ntoward the permutations of novelty\u2014
\ndriftwood and shipwreck, last night\u2019s
\nbeer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
\nresidue of plastic\u2014with random
\nimpartiality, playing catch or tag
\nor touch-last like a terrier,
\nturning the same thing over and over,
\nover and over. For the ocean, nothing
\nis beneath consideration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These lines from \u201cBeach Glass,\u201d an early poem in her first collection, set the reader up for the speaker\u2019s hunt for sea glass on the beach. The poem, however, turns out to be about sand, and about how nothing, physical or intellectual, is, in the tumult of sea time, built to last.<\/p>\n

Amy Clampitt graduated from Grinnell College in 1941, and lived from that time on mainly in New York City, where she worked as a secretary at Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and freelance researcher and editor. She summered in Corea, Maine, traveled in England, Italy, and Greece, and wrote novels that did not get published.<\/p>\n

In 1983 Clampitt published her first full-length collection of poems, The Kingfisher<\/em>, at the age of 63. It was followed by What the Light Was Like<\/em> in 1985, Archaic Figure<\/em> in 1987, Westward<\/em> in 1990, and A Silence Opens<\/em>, her final book, in 1994. The Collected Poems<\/em> appeared in 1997.<\/p>\n

Clampitt was a high-wired, highly cultured poet who wrote high-charged, highly erudite, descriptive, digressive poems. They reflect her life in Manhattan, her love of literature, her travels abroad, her prairie past, her passion for birds and flowers, her companionship with an unnamed man, and her intellectual concerns, including a wavering but stubborn spirituality.<\/p>\n

Her poetry was an intense late flowering that brought much critical attention. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, and of an Academy of American Poets fellowship in 1984, she was named a MacArthur Prize Fellow in 1992. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and taught writing at the College of William and Mary, Amherst College, and Smith College.<\/p>\n

Her summers over several decades in a rental cottage on the waterfront of Corea yielded her sea poems. This small working harbor thick with lobster boats and traps lies on the extreme southeast side of the Schoodic Peninsula, about six miles due east of Bar Harbor as the crow flies. \u2018Tit Manan lighthouse stands prominently to the south-southeast, a mile off.<\/p>\n

A second extraordinary sea poem, \u201cWhat the Light Was Like,\u201d served as the title poem for her second collection and is representative of her work. While the narrative core of the poem is maritime, it is enveloped by her usual obsessions\u2014birds, butterflies, flowers, trees and allusions to high culture, rendered lyrically. Composed in twenty-nine stanzas of six-lines each, it is discursive, digressive, descriptive, syntactically dense, with a baroque vocabulary. \u201cWhat the Light Was Like\u201d is an elegy for a lobsterman who went out to work one morning and didn\u2019t come back. A search was conducted. Days later, his boat, its fuel burned, was found some fifty miles southwest of Corea, off Matinicus Rock, a sanctuary of puffins. The victim of a stroke or heart attack, he was found lodged amongst his gear on the afterdeck.<\/p>\n

The elegy approaches greatness on many levels, not least for the summer visitor\u2019s questioning \u201cwhat the light was like\u201d in the lobsterman\u2019s last glimpse of planet Earth and, perhaps, his first glimpse of what Hamlet called \u201cthe undiscovered country.\u201d<\/p>\n

                                 [the light] that\u2019s always shifting\u2014from
\na nimbus gone berserk
\nto a single gorget, a cathedral train of blinking, or
\nthe fogbound shroud<\/p>\n

that can turn anywhere into a nowhere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clampitt wrote nearly a dozen sea-related poems, the majority appearing in her first two books. \u201cFog\u201d an early imagist poem capturing the sight, feel, and sound of its namesake, begins: \u201cA vagueness comes over everything, \/ as though proving color and contour \/ alike dispensable.\u201d \u201cMarine Surface, Low Overcast\u201d is an associative meditation on the grandeur of nature which she finds unequaled by anything manmade:<\/p>\n

this wind silver
\nrumpling as of oatfields,
\na suede of meadow,
\na nub, a nap, a mane of lustre
\nlithe as the slide
\nof muscle in its
\nsheath of skin<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe Cormorant in Its Element\u201d is an unrhymed sonnet that displays equally her empathetic interest in birds and command of descriptive language. It starts:<\/p>\n

That boney potbellied arrow, wing-pumping along
\nimplacably, with a ramrod\u2019s rigid adherence,
\nairborne, to the horizontal, discloses talents
\none would never have guessed at. Plummeting<\/p>\n

waterward, big black feet splayed for a landing
\ngear, slim head turning and turning, vermilion-
\nstrapped, this way and that<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Clampitt wrote, when she wrote about the sea, as an observer from her shoreside summer perch in Corea. According to Mary Jo Salter\u2019s \u201cForeword\u201d to The Collected Poems<\/em>, she refused to fly in airplanes and made her numerous trips to Europe and back by ocean liner. Not a single published poem reflects this experience.<\/p>\n

However, in her letters, some of which appear in Love, Amy, a selection<\/em>, there are two written while making eastbound passages on ocean liners to the Mediterranean. We learn she does not get seasick, enjoys sunbathing and partying, and that shipboard life among her fellow travelers, along with forays ashore, are her main interests. One entry made aboard the Greek T.S.S. Olympia<\/em> on 3 May 1965 gives the idea of her at sea: “Without doubt this has been the most thoroughly delightful crossing I have ever made. Things went on getting better and better when it began to seem that they couldn\u2019t<\/em> be any more enchanting. That fabulous day when we entered the Straits of Gibraltar and found ourselves in a blue, calm Mediterranean, ended with a Mediterranean sunset\u2014all rose and indigo with glowing bands of clouds across the west after the sun went down. The day ended, but the night went on and on, and a good deal of it was spent on deck, singing under the stars, with an interlude below, in a part of the ship where the fun didn\u2019t begin until midnight, when a Greek band started playing….”<\/p>\n

It was her shoreside time in Corea, Maine, that provided her sense of the sea and of those who work on it.<\/p>\n

\u201cHanded Down,\u201d a third extraordinary sea poem, is a late one in Clampitt\u2019s final collection. While \u201cWhat the Light Was Like\u201d could be seen as a report from Corea, \u201cHanded Down\u201d seems like a summary of her summers there, at once a tour of the local cemetery and a retelling of a wharfside story she\u2019d learned about. The poem\u2019s diction is uncharacteristically plain, the syntax simple, the highbrow literary allusions absent. As if hedging her bets, she seems to have descended from her mandarin perch to shoreside folk culture. Perhaps her truest sea poem, it begins:<\/p>\n

Raymond Hodgkins, his dragger last seen
\nin heavy seas off Schoodic, night falling
\nand still no word of him; and before him<\/p>\n

Buddy Closson, Herb Damon, Ben Day,
\nClyde Haskell, Larry Robins senior,
\nAlan Thompson: the roll of the names<\/p>\n

goes on and on<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The middle of the elegy tells the particular story of Ray Dunbar, who was lost with the Lillian Mae, and of the search for his body. It ends:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the names,
\nthe roll call handed on and let down<\/p>\n

in heavy seas, the visibility near zero,
\nthe solitude total, night falling\u2014it\u2019s the names
\nof the dead, kept alive, they still hold on to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

“Beach Glass” (1983)<\/p>\n

Poets.org<\/a><\/p>\n

“The Kingfisher” (1983)<\/p>\n

PoetryFoundation.org<\/a><\/p>\n

“Fog”, annotated (1983)<\/p>\n

Poets.org<\/a><\/p>\n

“A Hermit Thrush” reading<\/p>\n

Poetry Archive<\/a><\/p>\n

Four poems<\/em><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

The Kingfisher<\/em> (1983)<\/p>\n

Archive.org<\/a><\/p>\n

What the Light Was Like<\/em> (1985)<\/p>\n

Archive.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Westward<\/em> (1990)<\/p>\n

Archive.org<\/a><\/p>\n

A Silence Opens<\/em> (1994)<\/p>\n

Archive.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Collected Poems<\/em> (1997)<\/p>\n

Archive.org<\/a><\/p>\n

1994 reading at the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center<\/p>\n

YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Further Studies:<\/em><\/p>\n

Spiegelman, Willard, ed. <\/em>Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt. New York, Columbia UP: 2005.<\/em><\/p>\n

Benfey, Christopher. “Nowhere Wholly at Home.”<\/a> <\/em>New York Times, 9 Nov. 1997.<\/em><\/p>\n

keywords: white, female<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Richard Dey (2014) AMY CLAMPITT (1920\u20131994). Born and raised on a small farm in Iowa, this poet, who was best known for her highly cultured work, wrote a few extraordinary sea poems. Here are lines from the first:   Continue reading &<\/span> text links<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":498,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[25916],"tags":[53756,53769,53735,53797,53786,53766],"class_list":["post-1285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c","tag-20th-century","tag-atlantic-ocean","tag-audio","tag-coastal-life","tag-passenger-travel","tag-poetry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/498"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1285"}],"version-history":[{"count":60,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6674,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1285\/revisions\/6674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}