`Collected Poems’ captures Clampitt’s dance of language> Late writer captured Maine coastal life

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF AMY CLAMPITT, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 471 pages, $30 cloth.

The distinguished poet Amy Clampitt, who died in 1994, spent the last 20 years of her life making regular visits to Easterly, a summer cottage built in Corea by the late painter Grattan Condon and still owned by his family. It was here that Clampitt composed a number of her poems that appear in this fine collection. Jackson Rodgers, Grattan Condon’s daughter, told me that Clampitt had learned of Corea through the works of author Louise Dickinson Rich (“The Peninsula,” “The Coast of Maine”), who also used to stay and write at Easterly.

In her poem “What the Light Was Like,” which is dedicated to Rich and “the family of Ernest Woodward,” she writes of the death of a lobsterman and the effect on his Maine fishing village.

The poem, one of the best ever written about life on the Maine coast, begins:

“Every year in June — up here, that’s the month for lilacs — almost his whole front yard,

with lobster traps stacked out in back, atop the rise that overlooks the inlet

would be a Himalayan range of peaks of bloom,

white or mauve — violet,

gusting a turbulence of perfume, and every year the same …”

In her lovely foreward, poet and friend Mary Jo Salter writes that Clampitt’s “earliest memory was of blue violets.” Even though she spent most of her life on the East Coast — in Manhattan, Massachusetts and Maine — Clampitt was born and raised on an Iowa farm where she “never forgot that she was the descendant of pioneers.” As Salter writes, she “never lost the sense of her early childhood as a paradise from which she was expelled.” On her grandparents’ farm, “she developed an ease in the natural world that was a delight in itself, and also linked with the pleasures of naming and remembering. She knew, for instance, that her passion for bird-watching began at the age of five.” About that earliest memory of the bed of violets, Clampitt later wrote: “It is as though I became in that instant aware of edges, shores, boundaries, limitations. The shell had cracked: an exodus, an expulsion, was under way.”

The collection contains all of her poems from her five previous books: “The Kingfisher” (1983), “What the Light Was Like” (1985), “Archaic Figure” (1987), “Westward” (1990) and “A Silence Opens” (1994).

Clampitt became famous at age 63 with the publication of her first book, “The Kingfisher,” which won critical raves. Feature stories were published in major magazines. Clampitt was heralded as writing “poetry for grown-ups.” Besides birds and wildflowers, Clampitt writes “with lasting and deep feeling about all sorts of landscapes — the prairies of her Iowa childhood, the fog-wrapped coast of Maine, and places she visited in Europe.” As it says on the book flap of “Collected Poems,” “Amy Clampitt’s themes are the very American ones of place and displacement.”

Since she lived most of her adult life in New York City, she wrote of that, too, along with other major subjects of our violent century: war, the Holocaust, demonstrations, and protest by suicide.

Salter writes, “As her poems went public, so did her person. Into her 11 years of life as a famous older poet she packed more activity than most people half her age would have attempted. She continued to rent a summer cottage (and create many of her most radiant poems) in Corea, Maine, a sort of no-home away from no-home; she treasured her Down East friends, the view of ‘Tit Manan lighthouse and the walk to the outer bar, but she took a pointed pleasure in not really belonging to Corea any more than she did to Manhattan or had to Iowa.”

Critic Helen Vendler wrote in the New Yorker magazine: “In her Maine poems Clampitt notices the recrudescent mosses and sundews, everyday plants, as a stay against decay, and admires in `High Noon’ an elderly woman who is still bestowing, however faded herself, unfaded flowers on the young.”

In her poem “At Easterly,” Clampitt describes the quality of Maine fog, and in “Handed Down,” she writes of the lives and deaths of more lobstermen from Corea. In “The Outer Bar,” she writes:

“One morning at low tide you walk dry-shod across

a shadow isthmus to the outer bar,

you find yourself, once over, sinking at every step

into a luscious mess.”

Poet Baron Wormser, who lives in Hallowell and who knew Clampitt well, says of her work: “There’s a remarkable amount of word energy — lexical energy — then there’s this thing that goes on in her work when she takes an event or scene and renders it in language and it’s a lot more than a description — it’s a transmuting into the stuff of language. All her poems are very aware that they are the stuff of language.”

He adds: “She was a very moral writer, among her most stirring poems there is this strong moral tenor, like the poems about the fishing people in Corea and the guy who set himself afire at the Pentagon. She worked for the Eugene McCarthy for President campaign in 1968. She was a politically moral person who wanted America to be a moral democracy.”

Poet and publisher Constance Hunting of Orono did a two-part interview with Clampitt in Hunting’s Puckerbrush Review. Hunting said about Clampitt’s poetry: “The electricity comes directly from her honoring language and what it can do. Her poetry is a series of actions, of language actions. I like the way she sees herself in the line of poets from Wordsworth and Keats. She’s very much in the line and she was very conscious of the links in western poetry, conscious of her ancestors and shaping tribute to them.”

Hunting interviewed Clampitt at Easterly and she remembers how excited Clampitt became when a sailboat went by. Hunting also noticed the wildflowers the poet had picked and arranged in a glass jar. Hunting said, “She looked at what she picked and her observations were so clear.”

It was my privilege and pleasure, too, to know Amy Clampitt and her husband, Hal Korn; and I visited them in Corea several times. I was there the day after Clampitt had heard she had been awarded the MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” of several hundred thousand dollars. In her wonderful, childlike way, she giggled telling me about all the trouble CBS News was having trying to reach her in Corea.

Clampitt’s brother, Lawrence Clampitt, lives in Brunswick, and in 1992, she addressed the graduating class at Bowdoin College. Her topic was the “bravery peculiar to writers.” She talked of Bowdoin graduate and author Nathaniel Hawthorne’s bravery. In her closing statement, she said, “There is always the human tendency to suppress, to flatten, to stifle, to root out the difference. It takes another form here than in China, but it is here. It worries me, and apparently it worries some of you. I am profoundly honored to be here, and that is my message.”

Amy Clampitt was a brave and profound poet and person, brilliantly gifted, and great fun to know. She once said, “As a poet I’m trying to sort out values … to discriminate between the authentic and the phony — to preserve what is worth preserving.”