Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt

A Conversation with Professor Willard Spiegelman

Abstract

In recent years, Professor Willard Spiegelman has devoted himself to one American poet above others, Iowa-born Amy Clampitt (1920–1994), whom Spiegelman knew personally and whose correspondence he edited in 2005 for a volume of selected letters, Love, Amy. In our conversation, we discussed his recent biography of the poet, Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt (2023), the cumulation of many years spent engaging with her five extant poetry collections and his efforts to piece together biographical fragments from remaining archival materials in order to compile a narrative of her life. Tracing her nearly four decades of artistic anonymity, her childhood in Iowa and early adult life in Manhattan, his biography narrates the surprise appearance of The Kingfisher, Clampitt’s first book of poems, published by Knopf in 1983 when she was sixty-three. All but overnight, Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, winning Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships, accepting prestigious writer positions at Amherst and Smith, and endearing herself to critics like Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler for a whirlwind eleven years before a premature death from ovarian cancer in 1994.