Name Amy Clampitt Role Poet | ||
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Died September 10, 1994, Lenox, Massachusetts, United States Awards MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Books The kingfisher, A silence opens, The collected poems of, Love - Amy: The Selected, Selected Poems Similar People Mary Jo Salter, Willard Spiegelman, Gjertrud Schnackenberg | ||
Education Grinnell College (1941) | ||
Wordfest at the mount 2013 amy clampitt memorial reading featuring mark strand
Amy Clampitt (June 15, 1920 – September 10, 1994) was an American poet and author.
Contents
- Wordfest at the mount 2013 amy clampitt memorial reading featuring mark strand
- 75 at 75 amy clampitt reads from a silence opens
- Life
- Poetry collections
- Prose
- References
75 at 75 amy clampitt reads from a silence opens
Life
Amy Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920 of Quaker parents, and brought up in New Providence, Iowa. In the American Academy of Arts and Letters and at nearby Grinnell College she began a study of English literature that eventually led her to poetry. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher. In the decade that followed, Clampitt published five books of poetry, including What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), and Westward (1990). Her last book, A Silence Opens, appeared in 1994. She also published a book of essays and several privately printed editions of her longer poems. She taught at the College of William and Mary, Smith College, and Amherst College, but it was her time spent in Manhattan, in a remote part of Maine, and on various trips to Europe, the former Soviet Union, Iowa, Wales, and England that most directly influenced her work. Clampitt was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Poets. She died of cancer in September 1994.
Poetry collections
Prose
