Nothing Stays Put

The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt

De: Willard Spiegelman

Narrado por: Arthur Morey, Cassandra Campbell

An evocative portrait of the beloved and acclaimed poet, whose late-in-life success took the literary world by storm.

With the publication of her first book of poems in her sixty-third year, Amy Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, launching herself from obscurity to the upper ranks of American poetry all but overnight, and living a whirlwind eleven years, until her death in 1994. Years later, as renowned poetry scholar Willard Spiegelman wades into her papers and poems, he discovers a woman of dazzling intellect, staunch progressive politics, and an inexhaustible sense of wonder for the world and the words we’ve invented to describe it.

Giving equal weight to the life and the poetry, Spiegelman untangles Clampitt’s famously allusive lines to reveal the experiences they emerged from, pulling the curtain back on her nearly four decades of artistic anonymity, and in doing so assembling a rich period piece of Manhattan during the days in which Clampitt worked for Oxford University Press and the National Audubon Society—writing cheery, discursive office memos, and two novels that never got published, before hitting her stride in verse.

Nothing Stays Put is a gift to poetry fans, an inspiration to artists striving at any age, and an ode to this most unlikely of literary celebrities, who would publish five acclaimed books and win a MacArthur “Genius Grant” nearly all in the final decade of her life.

Cover photograph (inset) courtesy of the Amy Clampitt Foundation. Amy Clampitt papers, Berg Collection, NYPL; (background) blue cornflowers. shapencolour/Alamy

A Wonderful Exploration of the Life of an Atypical Poet

This biography of the poet Amy Clampitt shows how a writer, raised in Iowa and relocating to New York City, can become famous later in life by study, persistence, and determination. Her journey was one of movement, thus the title, “Nothing Stays Put.” Her efforts took her down various roads, including working as an administrative assistant in the publishing industry, pursuing religious faith for a period of years, traveling in Europe, becoming a political activist during the 1970’s, and assiduously studying other authors. Finally realizing her talents weren’t as a novelist, she used her impressive vocabulary and love of words to craft poems with eloquence, allusions, natural descriptions, displacement of spirit, and an extraordinary re-ordering of words. Her style was unique, at times ornamental, and had a way of making the ordinary extraordinary. As a late blooming author myself, I really identified with her struggle and search for meaning. Willard Spiegelman did a thorough job writing the story of Amy’s life, and I found his rendition of her death moving and unforgettable. Spiegelman draws a connection between the mind, the heart, and how her poetry explores the broader themes of our humanity and the legacy each of us can leave behind for others. His comparison of Amy Clampitt to poet Emily Dickinson was very apt, as both were unconventional and discovered late in their lives. This book was written with much research and academic rigor. On the lighter side, I enjoyed hearing about the excitement, people, and atmosphere of New York City for an intellectual, and the changes Amy went through, including eventually finding romantic love. Extremely well read yet playful, finding fame yet humble, Amy Clampitt was in many ways the embodiment of paradox. This makes for an interesting biography.

Single reader would have been better.

Although the use of two readers is unique and was done smoothly in this production, it would have been better to have one reader, preferably male since the author is male, and since the author sometimes uses the first person in this book. Listeners and readers are more accustomed to bridging the reading of character transitions and quotations than they are absorbing an actual voice transition during a reading.

This production was good, but I would have preferred a single voice.