Craft: Amy Clampitt

Whoops! Yesterday’s post, “Writing Problems: Poetry Book Sales” was sent by mistake (human error: mine). I intended to schedule it for Aug. 26, 2023. Bonus!

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Amy Clampitt (1920–1994) is not unknown, but should be known better. At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, Clampitt’s poems have been subsumed by familiar poems with 21st century credibility: post-post modernist butt-scratching, identity-based confessionals, and trauma porn with less and less attention to craft the way Clampitt would have known it.

Although in her lifetime, she won all the big prizes (a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a Rockefeller Foundation Residency at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio), she didn’t publish her first book, Multitudes, Multitudes, until 1974 when she was 54, and her second, The Isthmus, in 1981 when she was 61. Subsequent books were: The Kingfisher, 1983; What the Light Was Like, 1985; Archaic Figure, 1987; and Westward, 1990.