Her Life
Amy Clampitt was born and brought up in New Providence, Iowa, graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. Her first full-length collection of poems, The Kingfisher, published in 1983, was followed in 1985 by What the Light Was Like, in 1987 by Archaic Figure, and in 1990 by Westward. A Silence Opens, her last book, appeared in 1994.
The recipient in 1982 of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1984 of an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, she was made a MacArthur Prize Fellow in 1992. She purchased a small house in Lenox, Mass., with part of the award and lived there briefly. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Writer in Residence at the College of William and Mary, Visiting Writer at Amherst College, and Grace Hazard Conkling Visiting Writer at Smith College. She died in September 1994. Her husband, Harold Korn, died in March 2001. It is his estate that has established the Amy Clampitt Fund.
In February of 2023, Willard Spiegelman published a biography of Clampitt entitled Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt, detailed below. You can also read Spiegelman's "A Poet's Life in Letters," an essay that introduces Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt. Here, he focuses on the scope of the letters and what they reveal about Clampitt not only as a successful writer but also as a woman in the years before she gained public recognition and acclaim. And here, in the foreword to The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, Mary Jo Salter considers Clampitt's life as a poet—from growing up in the fields of Iowa to political canvassing in Manhattan. Salter recounts her own personal memories of Amy Clampitt as a friend and fellow writer.
Additional prose by and about Amy Clampitt can be found in the essays section of this site.
Nothing Stays Put
The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt
by WIllard Spiegelman
Alfred A. Knopf | 28 February 2023 | 432pp. | 9780525658269
An evocative portrait of the beloved and acclaimed poet, whose late-in-life success took the literary world by storm.
“Clampitt comes to life here...Spiegelman’s Nothing Stays Put embodies a different kind of investigation, not surveillance but a thoughtful examination that at times still spins off into a kind of awe.” —The Washington Post
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.
