POETS Day! Amy Clampitt
“Why wait until the middle of a cold, dark night / When everything’s a little clearer in the light of day / And we know the night is always gonna be here anyway?” So sang The Starland Vocal Band. “I didn’t want to write an all-out sex song,” said songwriter Bill Danoff. “I just wanted to write something that was fun and hinted at sex.” So he took the title from a Clyde’s restaurant happy hour menu in Georgetown, D.C. he ate at while his wife was having surgery for cervical cancer. “Afternoon Delight” hit number one on the charts and a POETS Day anthem was born. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before even happy hour begins, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park, go for a swim, or God forbid, go for a light jog.
It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.
I’m pretty sure my uncle worked at that Clyde’s.
***
I’m not feeling terribly Christian at the moment.
My grumpy old man mood began when The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 2 caused a trip inside for a comparison with my high school copy of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. I was very comfortably reading in my backyard and the need for comparison annoyed me to no end.
I needed to check some of the footnotes in my high school book. Not a specific footnote; any would do. I flipped to The Canturbury Tales. “The holy blissful martyr for to seeke” with a superscript seven after martyr led the reader to “7. St. Thomas a Becket, murdered in Canturbury Cathedral in 1170.”
That was helpful. I’m eight hundred and fifty years removed from that last breath and just over six hundred from when Chaucer would assume that if he said “holy blissful martyr” the reader would think “Becket.” Without the footnote I might confuse Chaucer’s martyr with Spenser’s “And holy Martyrs often doen to dye,” which I’m kindly informed by Norton’s means “1. Probably a reference to Herod’s massacre of the Innocents (Matthew 2.16), traditionally viewed as the first martyrs for Christ.” Helpful stuff.
What sent me looking was a footnote I read in the Anthology of Modern and Contemporary. In Amy Clampitt’s “Hispaniola” there’s the line “brought to Alexander” with a little four after Alexander. “4. Macedonian emperor (365-323 B.C.E.).” I was so staggered by the apparent state of education that I didn’t bother rolling my eyes at B.C.E.
I like anthologies. Not as an end. Books put out by poets are almost always better than collections or anthologies for the same reason that albums are better than greatest hits. But anthologies are great for – I so badly want to write “poetaster” – sampling before you buy. A few Plath poems leads to reading Ariel, a few Rossetti Poems leads to reading Goblin Market and Other Poems, etc.. They work kinda like a shopping center where an anchor store like Walmart draws people in and Applebee’s plus a few CPAP shops benefit from the traffic. Feature Eliot and Auden and fill in with contemporaries most people would never otherwise come across. That’s how I found Amy Clampitt yesterday.
The downside to anthologies is dealing with Millicent. If you’re not familiar with her, Millicent is a recent liberal arts graduate whose podiatrist father and intellectual property lawyer mother, fearing having her laying around the house for another few years, called in a few favors and set her up with a non-taxing but interesting sounding, at least to the parent’s inquiring friends at the country club, internship in the publishing industry in New York. Last night, like every night, she stumbled into her apartment at 3 am, full of apple martinis and the cratering aftermath of too many energizing trips to the bathroom. By 9, she’s at her work desk groggily snarling her way through the pile of unsolicited submissions her bosses deemed unimportant enough to entrust to her. Or something like that.
Millicent is the creation of Anne Mini at Anne Mini’s Blog, but the character has taken on a life of her own in the minds of some (see above.) She’s the boogey man. A noise in the dark. A fiend writers use to scare their children: “Be good or Millicent will get you.” Mini’s blog is a great source of information about getting published. Writers need to write well, invent wonderful stories, be clever, be original, and all the stuff your high school English teacher who elongated the vowels in “transcendentalists” told you good writers do. But none of that matters if you can’t do the most important thing: Get past Millicent.
The Millicent that haunts me does side jobs writing copy; all the small descriptors and blurbs that are important to a publication but get done by underlings because they don’t make people want to have sex with the author. I learned to spot intern writing when I was employed as a wine buyer. I read a lot of reviews. If a red scored less than 90 the descriptions that followed contained “Bouquet”, “flinty”, “hints of”, “cassis”, “bold”, “malolactic”, and the like in no set order. Put words in a bag, shake, and give to the intern to type up.
I saw Millicent’s hand in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol 2 introduction to Amy Clampitt.
I read outside of Norton’s. Clampitt didn’t publish until her fifties. In 1974, she released Multides, Multides and became a regular poetic voice in The New Yorker but it was the publication of The Kingfisher in 1983 fixed her as an important voice in American poetry.
I’ve only read a sampling from her body of work, but I can see a few themes in her writing. Millicent says “Her poems often evoke complex resemblances between seemingly incongruous subjects.” That’s true. Clampitt uses metaphors.
In “Beethoven, Opus 111” she compares the composer writing music he strains to hear to her father working towards something he might never realize. Her father,
driving somewhere in Kansas or Colarado,
in dustbowl country, stopped the car
to dig up by the roots a flower
he’d never seen before – a kind
of prickly poppy most likely, its luminousness
wounding the blank plains like desire.
He mentioned in a letter the disappointment
of his having hoped in might transplant –
an episode that brings me near tears,
still, even as his dying does not –
She continues with the “seemingly incongruous subjects,”
Beethoven, shut up with the four walls
of his deafness, rehearsing the unhearable
semplice e cantabile, somehow reconstituting
the blister shirt of the intolerable
into these shakes and triplets, a hurrying
into flowering along fencerows: dying,
for my father, came to be like that
finally – in its messages the levitation
of serenity, as though the spirit might
aspire, in its last act.
In “The Kingfisher,” the titular poem from her breakout book, she writes,
Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard
through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird
reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered.
One of her last works is “Syrinx,” published the year she died. I needed the Norton’s footnote here. In case you do too, Syrinx is “7. Vocal organs of birds, named after a Greek nymph who was turned into a reed to protect her chastity from Pan. Pan made the panpipe, or syrinx, from that reed.”
Syrinx
Like the foghorn that’s all lung,
the wind chime that’s all percussion,
like the wind itself, that’s merely air
in a terrible fret, without so much
as a finger to articulate
what ails it, the aeolian
syrinx, that reed
in the throat of a bird,
when it comes to the shaping of
what we call consonants, is
too imprecise for consensus
about what it even seems to
be saying: is it o-ka-lee
or con-ka-ree, is it really jug jug,
is it cuckoo for that matter?–
much less whether a bird’s call
means anything in
particular, or at all.Syntax comes last, there can be
no doubt of it: came last,
can be thought of (is
thought of by some) as a
higher form of expression:
is, in extremity, first to
be jettisoned: as the diva
onstage, all soaring
pectoral breathwork,
takes off, pure vowel
breaking free of the dry,
the merely fricative
husk of the particular, rises
past saying anything, any
more than the wind in
the trees, waves breaking,
or Homer’s gibbering
Thespesiae iache:those last-chance vestiges
above the threshold, the all-
but dispossessed of breath.
Clampitt died of cancer. She likely would have known how much time she had left when she wrote “Syrinx.” I don’t know if it was meant to be a bookend to “The Kingfisher” because I don’t know enough about what was written in between, but from a bird’s “scream nobody answered” to a bird voice through a god’s flute that “rises past saying anything” makes me want to read more of her poetry.
Millicent points out that “Patterns of alliteration, assonance, and rhythmic parallelism bind together her words.” I can’t think of many poets that wouldn’t apply to. Put words in a bag, shake, and give to the intern to type up.
To be fair, I’m pretty sure Millicent read the poems before writing the intro because of the word “diaphanous.” You don’t see that one very often. It’s no hapax legomenon, but it’s uncommon enough that it struck when I read it in the intro and then, two pages later in “Beethoven, Opus 111” I saw “the ancient regime’s diaphanous plash / athwart the mounting throb of hobnails.” Maybe it’s a coincidence.
As much as I make fun, I’m really happy with my Norton’s Modern and Contemporary, especially considering I bought the $200 two volume set for $18.71 used and can find no more wear and tear than I would have inflicted in a few months. Clampitt is my first find and I look forward to reading The Kingfisher for a concentrated taste. Anthologies aren’t the end.
This last poem is dated 1983 so I assume it’s from The Kingfisher.
Beach Glass
Amy Clampitt (1920-1994)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.
