Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt

Name: Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt
Author: Willard Spiegelman
ISBN: 9780525658276

Willard Spiegelman

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Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt

Willard Spiegelman

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Nothing Stays Put won the MacArthur "Genius Grant" and was a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. An evocative portrait of the beloved and acclaimed poet, whose late-in-life success took the literary world by storm. With the publication of her first book of poems in her sixty-third year, Amy Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, launching herself from obscurity to the upper ranks of American poetry all but overnight, and living a whirlwind eleven years, until her death in 1994. Years later, as renowned poetry scholar Willard Spiegelman wades into her papers and poems, he discovers a woman of dazzling intellect, staunch progressive politics, and an inexhaustible sense of wonder for the world and the words we've invented to describe it. Giving equal weight to the life and the poetry, Spiegelman untangles Clampitt's famously allusive lines to reveal the experiences they emerged from, pulling the curtain back on her nearly four decades of artistic anonymity, and in doing so assembling a rich period piece of Manhattan during the days in which Clampitt worked for Oxford University Press and the National Audubon Society—writing cheery, discursive office memos, and two novels that never got published, before hitting her stride in verse.

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