Ten years ago fabulous and quirky Walter Skold, founder of the Dead Poets Society, asked me to read at the inaugural Maine tour of, obviously, dead Maine poets at the top of Cadillac Mountain. I was going to get to read Amy Clampitt, but weather and miscommunication left me on a blustery peak with no audience.
When the Maine Women Writers Collection asked me to send a video of my reading for National Poetry Month this year while our world has been transforming, I knew I would read Clampitt, who was wise and quirky, daring and luminous, and so are her poems. Every time you read one—for the first or the fiftieth time—you are being offered a new way of connecting—with language, with yourself, and with the world, however you define it.
Amy Clampitt was with us from 1920 to 1994. Her first poem was published in The New Yorker when she was 58; her first collection came out when she was 63; in the following 10 years she published five more and was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship two years before she left us. That has always buoyed me. In Amy Clampitt’s voice, the world resonates with delectable intentions; subway platforms can be mated with moss and ferns; and “rose-hips / are vested in silenced / chimes of the finest, / clearest sea-crystal.” My thanks to Walter (who left us in 2018), to Annie Finch (who gave him my name), and to Jefferson Navicky (who asked me to contribute to the MWWC readings).
