Amy Clampitt, Selected Poems (review)

Calling someone a poet’s poet is damning with faint praise, like saying that caviar is too rich, delicate, and complex for ordinary tastes, or that fancy hotels make one feel uncomfortable. The late Amy Clampitt (1920–1994) wrote poems that are indeed rich, delicate, and complex, and for these she received as much derision as praise, from both other poets and general readers, during her lifetime. But now, three decades after her first poems appeared, what shall we say? We can never predict which ledge of Parnassus will ultimately harbor which poets, and the seating arrangements vary with time, as tastes change and yesterday’s “immortals” are replaced by tomorrow’s favorites. Canon-making is a fool’s game, because one generation’s canon becomes the next one’s cannon fodder. For the most part, Elizabeth Bishop being the one great exception, the reputations of poets decline after the deaths. Making bets, however, is always tempting. I think, or at least wish, that Clampitt will survive.

It is good, especially for partisans of Clampitt, those of us who saw and believed, who loved her poems, and who welcomed her comet-like rise onto the scene in the 1980s, to have her back in print. Mary Jo Salter, editor of The Collected Poems, has done us, especially professors and our students, and—we can only hope—new readers, a great service by bringing the collected work into a manageable form, reducing Clampitt’s five elegant, original Knopf volumes to slightly less than 300 pages. Culling is never easy, and every Clampitt aficionado will notice and regret the exclusion of former favorites. But the general richness remains, as do the great poems, starting with those from The Kingfisher, the first volume. We rediscover both shorter lyrics like “Fog,” “Sea Mouse,” and “The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews” (Clampitt’s first New Yorker acceptance), and the longer historical-political work that gives the lie to those critics who thought of Clampitt as a mere epigone of Marianne Moore, just another garrulous lady poet much obsessed with nature and books. She wrote more than beautiful short lyrics; she also penned important political poems of which Salter has included the best. The earliest testimonies to her Quaker-activist commitment—“Beethoven, Opus 111,” “A Procession at Candlemas,” “The Dahlia Gardens”—as well as later long poems like “An Anatomy of Migraine,” “The Prairie,” “Matoaka,” and the eight-part sequence “Voyages: A Homage to John Keats” certainly prove the seriousness of Clampitt’s involvement in social issues and her own gestures at making a place for herself within the several communities to which she belonged or wished to enter. And although she may have been a typical Greenwich Village leftie Beatnik, she was also committed to the pantheon of English poetry, high European culture, and the Western literary tradition.

Now that the details of Clampitt’s rise to fame following decades of obscurity and non-production have become the stuff of legend and the cause for hope in every well-meaning middle-aged “creative” writer who attends workshops and conferences, it may be time to look at her and her work from a historical position, attempting to align her and it within the climate of which they were a part. In retrospect, the 1980s can seem pretty grim, especially for poets. New York, where Clampitt spent her adult life, had just teetered back from the brink of near-financial collapse. Its streets were filthy. Drug addiction was rampant; AIDS had begun its devastations. The Vietnam War had concluded, but Reaganomics had taken hold, and the gradual elimination of a middle class was turning Manhattan into an island of the few haves and the far greater have-nots.

The prevailing poetic mode, from which Clampitt was in full flight, was the plain speech made popular in poetry workshops, its product the so-called McPoem that favored “daring” line-breaks as the only element by which a reader (never a listener) could tell that he was reading a poem...