The DeGoyler Library hosted a poetry reading and lecture, “The Making of a Poet’s Life Through Letters: The Case of Amy Clampitt,” by SMU Hughes Professor of English and Editor of Southwest Review Willard Spiegelman last Thursday.
“A professor is someone who speaks for an hour,” Spiegelman began, adding that he would try to uphold his title and noting “it is perilously close to cocktail hour and dinner.”
As Spiegelman began to tell the life story of poet and writer Amy Clampitt, the light-hearted atmosphere in the room was reestablished and all eyes were on the speaker.
He described Clampitt as a “teacozy with pencils in her hair who lived like a bohemian, fought like a radical and wrote like an angel” and deemed her the “patron saint of late bloomers.” He said that although she had been writing all her life, she first published a volume of her works at the age of 63, only 11 years before she died in September 1994.
Spiegelman read Clampitt’s poem “Losing Track of Language,” which he said best exemplified her love of travel, European civilization and language, along with her desire to meet people, which he attributed to her upbringing in a Quaker family on a farm in New Providence, Iowa.
Clampitt had aspired to be a novelist all her life and wrote three novels which Spiegelman called “awful.” He then went on to describe the day when she had an epiphany at the New York Cloisters Museum. As Clampitt attempted to journal the experience later that day, her words unwittingly began to rhyme, finally making poetry her claim to fame.