I enjoy a cup of tea and a book in the afternoon, and today found a new book that went perfectly with my English Breakfast Tea (just published this August 2005) edited by Willard Spiegelman: Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt.I mentioned Amy Clampitt in a post just the other day, since she came up in conversation with Sally Read, the English poet, who also intends to read this book.
I am very fond of Clampitt's poetry, in the same way that I delight in the work of Hopkins, Stevens and (some of) Ormsby - for the music, and the manifold textures, sensuous details, the observation wrapped around fine eloquence and elegance - refinement on fire made of vermilion you might opine. She loved words well-placed, and meaning well. You might observe - incorrectly - that there is something askew about having mention of Amy Clampitt (her name the best poem of all!) so close to a post on Todd Colby, who is so contemporary and punk-oriented - as many will make the diction-character error (that there is an essential low and high equivalence between a person's artistic tastes and style and their personal code of conduct).
But, Amy Clampitt, who was the most "British" of American poets (she loved George Eliot and Keats) also was a Quaker, an antiwar peace activist (something which I share with her), and, at the end of her life, according to Spiegelman, "excited by poetry slams". That a poet published by Faber & Faber could frequent such coffeehouse events with enthusiasm and without snobbery - in short, would have enjoyed, in her eclectic fashion, Todd Colby's aesthetic as well as her own - is refreshing, even as it is alien to the mainly conformist mindset of those in Britain, who, even as they name drop Berryman or Lowell, would run a mile to avoid a line of verse that did not scan, or that hinted at emotion, or anything as vulgar as the grand, unironic, Whitmanian statement. Clampitt, that most British of poets, turns out also, in her letters, to be most American (she was a fan of Dickinson and Whitman, too). In short, she is heroic.
The Letters are very moving - though the collection is slim.
I have only dipped in, but it's a fascinating selection. Clampitt, of course, became famous very late in life (in her 60s) - she started writing poetry in her 50s - so she is very much an icon of never-give-up-ness, which poets need to have, to remain sane in what is a very indifferent and topsy-turvy publishing climate (one where talent takes a backseat to prize winnings, as if poetry was a greased pig at a country fair) with all the hokum that implies. She turned down the editor's role for Best American Poetry in the mid-80s, which is also impressive - so much poetry now depends on a poet's career moves, or so it seems to them - so many a younger poet must be stunned to read the letter in which she politely but firmly refuses to weed through and find her favourites. I think it is a shame she hadn't the confidence to do this, since her selections would have been as justified as anyone else's and likely more interesting.
I wrote a poem on a train this spring, returning from Bristol where I'd been giving a poetry workshop, and it was after reading The Kingfisher, one of the great debuts in poetry history. I was trying to fit her and Stevens together. The poem first appeared on the Cordite website (see link) but I am also going to append it here below.
The Lighthouse Keeper
It might be wiser to weather in a lighthouse
Than risk the vertical incisions of the storm
That seems to have rescued the torn sea from itself
Only to let it return, this time as tragedy, as full rain.
No longer as young as when, morning, the sky, like pearl,
Was forming an idea, both pale and rare, you shelve
The green Clampitt and admit night's other influence
Now as the vicious parakeet of light screeches again.
It is a wise reader that stays in for the Horn's winter,
Knowing no matter how literal the mad trades - hurling -
Desire to become, wildness winters in this tall home,
A tower whose saving grace revolves above its calm.
The custom is to lay provisions, storing for the squall;
To reflect on through the many fog-throttled panes, water.
poem by Todd Swift
Comments