 Sponsored by Library of America The poet Amy Clampitt was born in 1920; her first collection of poetry, The Kingfisher, was published in 1983, to great acclaim. That late success is a beloved part of her legend, and in the first biography of Clampitt, Nothing Stays Put, published in 2023, Willard Spiegelman calls her “one of the Patron Saints of Late Bloomers.” In the Review’s December 4 issue, Anthony Domestico writes that “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.” His essay amounts to a close reading of her work that considers the poems alongside her life, in particular her spiritual life; as Domestico writes, “Clampitt was a deeply and complicatedly religious poet.” That was as true of her verse—“the unction/of sheer nonexistence,” goes one representative line—as it was of her life, especially after a sudden conversion experience she had at a museum.  Anthony Domestico Domestico is an associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, where he helps run the Durst Distinguished Lecture Series, as well as the books columnist at Commonweal. He is the author of the book Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period (2017), and his criticism has appeared in The Atlantic, The Baffler, Book Post, and The Washington Post, among other publications. Domestico and I emailed this week to talk about conversions, late beginnings, and why undergraduates love Elizabeth Bishop.  Advertisement Lauren Kane: When were you first introduced to Clampitt’s work? What did you make of it then, and what does it mean to you now? Anthony Domestico: I think the first poem I read by Clampitt was “Winchester: The Autumn Equinox,” in an undergraduate seminar on Keats. Keats’s “To Autumn” was my favorite poem in the world (it still is), and I loved how Clampitt both channeled Keats’s music—“how beautiful/the season was,” she writes, “ay, better than/the chilly green of spring”—and added her own distinctive notes. The first stanza, for instance, in typical Clampitt fashion, is an eleven-line sentence. I don’t remember reading anything else by Clampitt until almost ten years later, when I picked up a couple of her collections at a used bookstore in Chicago. She really doesn’t sound like anyone else, and reading several of her books in a rush confirmed and amplified my affection. Above all, I admire the risks she took in her writing. She was willing to push a sentence past the point you think it would, and maybe should, end. She loved gorgeous language and baroque syntax and was unembarrassed to include those things in her poems. One contemporary critic lamented Clampitt’s “bent toward erudite inebriated nonsense.” I’d say that’s one of the reasons we go to poetry in the first place: to indulge in language, ideas, and music, all to the point of excess. Not many poets achieve a singular style, but Clampitt did, and it’s a style that continues to delight and move me. Much of the fascination with her stems from her late-in-life debut. Why do you think such a story holds a particular shine for readers? Clampitt’s beloved Keats said that “a Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory.” For those people who feel that they haven’t accomplished enough yet—which is to say almost all of us!—Clampitt’s life provides an allegory of persistence rewarded. For many, many years, she worked on not particularly good novels and unsuccessful poems. At one point she quits her office job to finally become a writer. A year later she is back at a different office job. She failed and she failed and she failed and then, almost miraculously, she succeeded. Clampitt’s life had sorrows, of course, and not everyone celebrated her success. Mary Karr, for instance, described Clampitt’s poetry as “a parody of the Victorian silk that Pound sought to unravel”: purplish, self-indulgent, fancy to the point of fustiness. But it’s hard not to read the shape of her life optimistically. There’s still time, it seems to tell us.  Advertisement Much of your essay is concerned with Clampitt’s conversion experience, which happened at the Cloisters in Manhattan, an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum designed to look like a medieval monastery. What do you think of conversion narratives? What are some of your favorites, both in nonfiction and fiction? Conversion narratives fail to be interesting, and they often do, when they’re too neat and tidy. The old self is sloughed off, if not with ease then certainly with finality, and a new and pristine self stands in its stead. That’s generally not how such things happen—and it’s certainly not how Clampitt’s conversion played out. Her experience at the Cloisters in 1956 seemed to change everything: in response, she joined the Episcopal Church and started writing poetry instead of prose. But then things changed back: within a few years she was failing at fiction once again; in 1971 she left the Episcopal Church. Nothing stays put, as she wrote, so central a principle to understanding her that Spiegelman chose the phrase for his biography’s title. Conversion narratives seem truest to me when they recognize that our lives are rarely defined by a single and decisive turn. The opening of Ash-Wednesday, often described as T.S. Eliot’s conversion poem, gets across the stuttering, always-incomplete nature of conversion: “Because I do not hope to turn again/Because I do not hope/Because I do not hope to turn.” My favorite conversion narrative is, and probably always will be, Augustine’s Confessions. No one has written more memorably about the tortured desires that can both drive and impede conversion: “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.” The late Fanny Howe’s novel Indivisible (2000) is a strange and wonderful account of a woman’s halting journey toward God; so is Christopher Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder (2012). George Herbert’s perfect poem “Love (III)” describes the push and pull of grace—“Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back/Guilty of dust and sin.” Simone Weil said that while reciting Herbert’s poem to help her deal with a brutal headache, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.” Who are some of your favorite writers to teach to undergraduates, and why? There are some writers whom I love but have never quite figured out how to teach, perhaps because I feel too close to the material. I tried teaching Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead only once and was unable to bear my students not loving that book as much as I do. But another of my favorite writers, Elizabeth Bishop, is a joy to talk about in class. Her poems can seem uncomplicated—in this one, a speaker describes a fish; in that one, a speaker goes to a gas station—and students don’t feel particularly intimidated by them. And yet the poems are so masterfully composed, so subtle in their tonal and perspectival shifts, that they reward endless unpacking. They are, as Bishop writes of the sea, “cold dark deep and absolutely clear.” Of more recent vintage, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition (2019) helped get my students to see the sonnet as a living, dynamic form, while Lawrence Joseph’s So Where Are We? (2017) demonstrated that poets don’t have to choose between political engagement and formal brilliance. I actually teach more prose than poetry. Whenever I’m not teaching Jane Austen, I wish I were: students really care about her novels, and I find that this personal investment often translates into critical attentiveness. The other day a student told me that The Portrait of a Lady, which we read together last year, is now her favorite novel. It’s nice to know that I’ve converted at least one person to the religion of Henry James. If someone were to read one poem by Amy Clampitt, what should it be? It’s an obvious answer, but probably the poem that started her career: “The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews.” Everything that makes Clampitt such a wonder—the visual attentiveness, the linguistic extravagance, the syntactic ingenuity—is there. Then move on to her elegy for her father, “Beethoven, Opus III,” a great Midwestern poem and an even greater account of how form transmutes experience into art: “out of a humdrum squalor the levitations.”  Advertisement More by Anthony Domestico at nybooks.com Ever InwardA biography of the poet Amy Clampitt shows how poetry germinated throughout her life and blossomed in a late-career flourishing. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.   You are receiving this message because you signed up Update your address or preferencesView this newsletter onlineThe New York Review of Books |
sábado, 29 de noviembre de 2025
‘But Not Yet’
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