"My Own Brand of Nonconformity..."

view from the room
where Clampitt died

The most recent issue of West Branch features my essay, "Dear Amy," which also appears online. What follows is the essay's opening section, along with a few photos taken during my visit to Amy Clampitt's Massachusetts cottage:

I've traded Middle Eastern sands for snow: a half acre or so of it, freshly fallen and packed across the fenced-in lot just a short uphill walk from the village center of Lenox, Massachusetts. After travelling almost twenty-four hours by plane and shuttle tram, by taxi, train and car, I've arrived from my home in Jordan's desert capital of Amman to the slate-grey Cape-style cottage on Neilsen Lane where Amy Clampitt and her life partner, Harold "Hal" Korn, spent a good deal of their final two years together before her death in 1994. I've come, in part, to visit a friend—a writer-in-residence picked to live and work among Clampitt's bookcases, antiques, and china—but I've also come in pursuit of what the poet herself identified in the seminal essay "Predecessors, Et Cetera" as "the livingness of the past."

By the time Clampitt and Korn bought the little house on Neilsen Lane—"We have no plans to move out of New York completely," she assured her family via letter in 1992, but want "a place to go to on weekends and in the summer, and eventually retire into"—Amy was already one of the most highly esteemed poets in America. (A fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation helped finance the couple's real estate purchase in Lenox.) The rise of Clampitt's literary celebrity, however, was as unconventional as the woman who lived in relative obscurity for sixty-three years before publishing her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher, in 1983 to widespread critical acclaim. Born into a Midwestern Quaker family, Clampitt graduated from Grinnell College and later abandoned graduate study at Columbia. She once worked as a reference librarian for the National Audubon Society, travelled abroad, briefly sublet her apartment in New York's Greenwich Village in order to help care for her schizophrenic sister in Iowa, took up the arts of jogging and ballet, refigured herself as a political activist, expressed in writing her conflicted feelings about psychoanalysis and the power plays accompanying serious love affairs, and even toyed with becoming an Episcopal nun. Throughout her six-odd decades of anonymity, Clampitt also drafted a series of failed novels and devoted much of her free time to self-education.

clampitt's beach glass

Although it would be years before she would move from the margins and into mainstream literary circles, thanks in part to championing in the late nineteen-seventies and eighties by The New Yorker's Howard Moss and critics like Helen Vendler, the poet's correspondence reveals a long and steadfast belief in her rightful place among the artistic elite. "I feel as if I could write a whole history of English literature," Clampitt avowed to her brother Philip as early as 1956, "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." Thus, without any publication history, nor professional affirmation of her talents, the then thirty-six-year-old somehow intuited her work would one day find its readership. In the meantime, Clampitt bided her time, absorbing texts by the likes of William Wordsworth and Marianne Moore, Henry James and Charles Darwin, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Virginia Woolf. She devoured Greek classics, the letters of Keats and, at one point, considered Dante her master. "Vocation is a curious thing," she later admitted in print. "I made a real try at not wanting to be a writer..."

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For more on Clampitt's house, selected letters, and poems, click over to West Branch to access "Dear Amy" in its entirety.

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Currently reading:

The Children (Paula Bohince)
Mule (Shane McCrae)