This week: Amy Clampitt Edited by: Stormy Lady  
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| This is poetry from the minds and the hearts of poets on Writing.Com. The poems I am going to be exposing throughout this newsletter are ones that I have found to be, very visual, mood setting and uniquely done. Stormy Lady |
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Beach Glass
by Amy Clampitt
While you walk the water's edge,
turning over concepts
I can't envision, the honking buoy
serves notice that at any time
the wind may change,
the reef-bell clatters
its treble monotone, deaf as Cassandra
to any note but warning. The ocean,
cumbered by no business more urgent
than keeping open old accounts
that never balanced,
goes on shuffling its millenniums
of quartz, granite, and basalt.
It behaves
toward the permutations of novelty—
driftwood and shipwreck, last night's
beer cans, spilt oil, the coughed-up
residue of plastic—with random
impartiality, playing catch or tag
ot touch-last like a terrier,
turning the same thing over and over,
over and over. For the ocean, nothing
is beneath consideration.
The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles
have been abandoned here, it's hopeless
to know which to salvage. Instead
I keep a lookout for beach glass—
amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase
of Almadén and Gallo, lapis
by way of (no getting around it,
I'm afraid) Phillips'
Milk of Magnesia, with now and then a rare
translucent turquoise or blurred amethyst
of no known origin.
The process
goes on forever: they came from sand,
they go back to gravel,
along with treasuries
of Murano, the buttressed
astonishments of Chartres,
which even now are readying
for being turned over and over as gravely
and gradually as an intellect
engaged in the hazardous
redefinition of structures
no one has yet looked at.
On June 15, !920, Amy Clampitt was born, in New Providence, Iowa. Her parents were Quakers. Her childhood was spent in a small farming community. She started writing at a very early age. She wrote poetry first and then moved to fiction, Clampitt attended Grinnell College. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree with honors in English. Clampitt went on to study for her graduate’s degree at Columbia University. She left before finishing, Upon leaving the college Clampitt started working as a secretary at the Oxford University Press.
In 1951 she left the Oxford University Press and spent five months exploring Europe. When she returned to the states she worked as a reference librarian at the Audubon Society and then as a freelance editor. In 1977 she began working as an editor at E. P. Dutton. She worked there until 1982 when she quit to focus on her writing. Clampitt became a full time poet with an occasional semester of teaching at a college. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. At the age of sixty-three she published her first collection of poetry, ”The Kingfisher.”
Over the next ten years Clampitt published five books of poetry. “What the Light Was Like” was published in 1985. Followed by ”Archaic Figure” in 1987 and ”Westward” in 1990. Her last book ”A Silence Opens,” was published in 1994. Clampitt was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, and in 1984 of an Academy Fellowship. Clampitt was made a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1992. She was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She taught at the College of William and Mary, Amherst College, and Smith College. She spent the last years of her life writing for journals and magazines.
Amy Clampitt died in Lenox Massachusetts on September 10, 1994 of cancer.
Fog
by Amy Clampitt
A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands' spruce-tips
drunk up like milk in the
universal emulsion; houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean.
Tactile
definition, however, has not been
totally banished: hanging
tassel by tassel, panicled
foxtail and needlegrass,
dropseed, furred hawkweed,
and last season's rose-hips
are vested in silenced
chimes of the finest,
clearest sea-crystal.
Opacity
opens up rooms, a showcase
for the hueless moonflower
corolla, as Georgia
O'Keefe might have seen it,
of foghorns; the nodding
campanula of bell buoys;
the ticking, linear
filigree of bird voices.
Vacant Lot With Pokeweed
by Amy Clampitt
Tufts, follicles, grubstake
biennial rosettes, a low-
life beach-blond scruff of
couch grass: notwithstanding
the interglinting dregs
of wholesale upheaval and
dismemberment, weeds do not
hesitate, the wheeling
rise of the ailanthus halts
at nothing—and look! here's
a pokeweed, sprung up from seed
dropped by some vagrant, that's
seized a foothold: a magenta-
girdered bower, gazebo twirls
of blossom rounding into
raw-buttoned, garnet-rodded
fruit one more wayfarer
perhaps may salvage from
the season's frittering,
the annual wreckage.
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winner of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] is:
Cleaning out old houses can be eyeopening as
Many of the surprises take your breath away.
Miss Agnes Tinker passed away quite unexpectedly
and her niece asked us to get things out of the way.
In the bedroom, were many photographs of the family
with older people who had hairstyles and clothes
that were beautiful to see. They looked
dainty and old fashioned from head to their toes.
Her little office held objects of art
that were bought decades ago.
And in a scented box was a bundle of letters
from a soldier, who was a very special beaux.
The parlor was a fascinating room
with record players, records and a tube radio.
There were songs that were patriotic or romantic,
while the radio played music, songs and soap operas shows.
In the kitchen we cleared out hand held gadgets.
They were hand held and still in good shape.
My mother explained the memories she had
with a sifter, an egg beater and grate.
Miss Tinker was a lonely person, who had kept her home
to be a place where time seemed to stand still.
The time was in a capsule of her fondest memories
which she lived on her own free will.
Honorable mention:
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Poetry: June 17, 2020 Issue [#10230]
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