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In Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt, Willard Spiegelman explores the highly unconventional path and mindset of this Iowa-born, late-blooming talent, who lived for much of her adult life in a small studio apartment in the Village and, after years of failing as a novelist, published her first collection, The Kingfisher, when she was sixty-two years old. She became an instant star in the field of American poetry; she died only eleven years later, leaving us with five beautiful books. A poet of long sentences and ornate, flowing music, Clampitt did not confide her secrets directly in her verse; the biography provides a kind of subterranean poetic map of her life. Of this energetic presence, a woman who wore vintage hats and scarves with flair, Spiegelman observes, “Amy knew how to live ‘poor,’ but she also knew, perhaps as compensation, how to write ‘rich.’” In the passage below, the poet immerses herself in studying Greek.

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As Clampitt was assembling what would become The Kingfisher, she did something she had long promised herself she would do. It was, in part, a much-delayed homage to her father, the Grinnell Classics major who had first taught her the Greek alphabet. Having studied Greek literature in translation, in school and college, and having finally visited Greece in 1965, she enrolled in Ancient Greek language classes. As early as 1954 she had written about wanting to read Sophocles in a bilingual edition, making use of a newly purchased secondhand Greek dictionary. A decade later, on board ship en route to Greece, she took daily half-hour classes to learn basic conversational phrases. Her intellectual curiosity was, as usual, excited by anything having to do with language, whether native or foreign, contemporary or dead. She got up the courage—as she had four years earlier when she enrolled in Daniel Gabriel’s workshop—to sign on for a weekly class in Attic Greek at The New School in the fall of 1981. She was sixty-one. She took her inspiration from the journalist I. F. Stone, who started his Greek studies at seventy-one in order to learn about Athenian democracy from Thucydides, in the original language. Her classmates ranged from curious young people to a retired physician who read with a magnifying glass. It was the kind of variegated community that had always appealed to Amy, this time in a classroom rather than in a bus or at a protest meeting. “Thrilling though formidably difficult,” the course was grist for an intellectual’s mental mill, with short selections from Pindar, Aeschylus, Simonides, and the Gospels circulating among the students every Saturday from nine in the morning until one in the afternoon, under the watchful eye of Sam Seigle, a moonlighting professor from Sarah Lawrence, whom Amy adored. He “has the learning and the imagination to bring the entire scene alive, and almost every minute he is striking flint with some new insight, historical or etymological.” The material was manna for the voracious student. Interviewed forty years later, Seigle remembered his student vividly. Coming from the avant-garde precincts of Sarah Lawrence, the professor taught without a syllabus, encouraging students in an elementary course to devise their own paths through new material in a strange tongue. They were forced to think for themselves, he said, especially about the nature of the words and phrases they were learning. “Always curious,” he said, Amy took to “the precision of syntax, and the exactitude of the language” with her typical intellectual alertness. She thrilled, her professor recalled, to the difference between an objective and a subjective genitive (e.g., the two meanings of “the love of God”), a concept she had previously not known. After the semester ended, Seigle never saw her again. Nor did he forget her. The following semester, Amy stayed uptown, at Hunter College, within walking distance of home on East 65th Street. Here she read Homer with Irving Kizner. She described this to Vendler as “one of the great experiences of my life.” And to Salter she recounted the mouthwatering thrill of those famous, ringing and untranslatable Homeric phrases like “polyphlosboio thalasses” (“the much-sounding sea”) whose sound is integral to the meaning, regardless how you translate it. She found “it impossible to convey the peculiar excitement that goes with all this: it’s like arriving in a place you’d dreamed of all your life.” When she was young, Amy had dreamed of Manhattan, of England, of Greece. She landed, successively, in all of them. She had dreamed, too, of the Greek language, and now was immersing herself in it. She landed in Greek as well as Greece. She traveled both in the flesh and in her mind. One lovely result was a Petrarchan sonnet—“Homer, A. D. 1982”—that appeared in What the Light Was Like. It begins with a nod to young John Keats’s first great poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” which conveys the excitement available to both real-life travelers and stay-at-home explorers who experience an original only vicariously, like Keats reading Homer in translation: “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, / And many goodly states and kingdoms seen.” Amy was a traveler of both sorts. Clampitt’s 1982 Manhattan is like, and unlike, Keats’s 1816 London. Here is the octave of her sonnet, dedicated to Kizner:

Much having traveled in the funkier realms of Ac- ademe, aboard a grungy elevator car, deus ex machina reversed, to this ninth floor classroom, its windows grimy, where the noise of traffic, πολυφλοίσβοιο-θαλάσσηζ-like, is chronic, we’ve seen since February the stupendous candor of the Iliad pour in, and for an hour and a quarter at the core the great pulse was dactylic.

An attentive reader can hear the poet mingling the dactylic rhythms (DUM-da-da) of Homer with the insistent iambs (da-DUM) of English, and alternating in her rhymes between the hard, consonantal endings in lines 1, 4, 5, and 8 and the more mellifluous, liquid sounds of lines 2, 3, 6, and 7. The “great pulse” is a throbbing, bilingual one, Homer’s and Clampitt’s together. This poem projects the energetic fun that a polyglot intellectual can have, and can share with her readers.

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