Love, Amy: The Selected Letters

by Amy Clampitt, Willard Spiegelman

This extraordinary collection of letters sheds light on one of the most important postwar American poets and on a creative woman's life from the 1950s onward. Amy Clampitt was an American original, a literary woman from a Quaker family in rural Iowa who came to New York after college and lived in Manhattan for almost forty years before she found success (or before it found her) at the age of 63 with the publication of The Kingfisher . Her letters from 1950 until her death in 1994 are a testimony to her fiercely independent spirit and her quest for various kinds of truth-religious, spiritual, political, and artistic.

Written in clear, limpid prose, Clampitt's letters illuminate the habits of imagination she would later use to such effect in her poetry. She offers, with wit and intelligence, an intimate and personal portrait of life as an independent woman recently arrived in New York City. She recounts her struggle to find a place for herself in the world of literature as well as the excitement of living in Manhattan. In other letters she describes a religious conversion (and then a gradual religious disillusionment) and her work as a political activist. Clampitt also reveals her passionate interest in and fascination with the world around her. She conveys her delight in a variety of day-to-day experiences and sights, reporting on trips to Europe, the books she has read, and her walks in nature.

After struggling as a novelist, Clampitt turned to poetry in her fifties and was eventually published in the New Yorker . In the last decade of her life she appeared like a meteor on the national literary scene, lionized and honored. In letters to Helen Vendler, Mary Jo Salter, and others, she discusses her poetry as well as her surprise at her newfound success and the long overdue satisfaction she obviously felt, along with gratitude, for her recognition.

Genres: Poetry

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Amy Clampitt was brought up in New Providence, Iowa. She wrote poetry in high school, but then ceased and focused her energies on writing fiction instead. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City.

To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher.

Clampitt was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Poets. She died of cancer in September 1994.

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know much about Amy Clampitt. I know next to nothing other than she was a New York poet who wrote beautiful things and was successful late in her life. Having read these letters, I don't know much more at all. They're interesting and well-written but the presentation of her letters while only giving us the bare bones of biography, without some detail about events and persons mentioned, and without any explanation as to who the addressees are or what they were to Clampitt only adds mystery to someone already not well known. It's as if Clampitt were enclosed behind walls over which we're not allowed to peek. One of the responsibilities of biographers or editors of letters such as these or of journals is to clarify their subject. Spiegelman helps very little this way. Because the nature of the relationship between Clampitt and those she wrote isn't made clear and given personality, the letters are more like journal entries. Most of the early ones are to her brother, Philip. Partly for that reason she includes few thoughts on her craft during those years she was trying to write novels rather than the poetry she's known for. Her poetry isn't mentioned until she was in her 50s because she didn't decide on poetry until then. Even after that, though, her epistolary intimates were few; included here are only Mary Jo Salter and Helen Vendler. I was surprised by a letter to a John I took to be John Adams, the composer. I was surprised, too, to discover she was deeply religious. The early letters to Philip are filled with her reflections on her faith in transition from the Quaker church of her family to the Anglican. Reading her poetry I'd not sensed that side of her. Her letters show her to be a gentle soul.

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amy Clampitt���s poetry is phenomenal, but she didn���t publish until she was in her sixties. Her letters show that writing, reading, and criticism were all an integral and essential part of her life as early as the 1950s���when the selection here begins���and that she knew writing was her calling. Even still, she knew that learning and practicing and revisiting were critical tasks a writer needs to pursue before mastering the craft.

Her letters are full of wit, precision, and an incisive wit that would later make its way into playwriting, novels, and finally her true calling: poetry. Reading the letters is a journey one takes along with Clampitt as she comes into her own, as she breaks new ground, traces her steps back, tries new tactics, and eventually finds her own voice���a voice she���s always sure she���s had, and one evident in her letters all throughout, but one that takes its time to evolve and reach maturity. It���s a journey well worth taking, and it proves that being a writer is much more than just writing: it is about honing one���s craft, learning about traditions, breaking molds, and experimenting over and over again.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

These letters help open up the political contexts for Clampitt's wonderful, bejewelled poems