{"id":55721,"date":"2025-11-29T18:34:27","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T18:34:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/55721\/"},"modified":"2025-11-29T18:34:27","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T18:34:27","slug":"but-not-yet-anthony-domestico-lauren-kane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/55721\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018But Not Yet\u2019 | Anthony Domestico, Lauren Kane"},"content":{"rendered":"

The poet Amy Clampitt was born in 1920; her first collection of poetry, The Kingfisher, was published in 1983, to great acclaim. That late success is a beloved part of her legend, and in the first biography of Clampitt, Nothing Stays Put, published in 2023, Willard Spiegelman calls her \u201cone of the Patron Saints of Late Bloomers.\u201d In the Review\u2019s December 4 issue, Anthony Domestico writes that<\/a> \u201cperhaps more interesting than Clampitt\u2019s late beginning was how she continued to grow\u2014and even radically change\u2014as a poet right through her final book.\u201d\u00a0His essay amounts to a close reading of her work that considers the poems alongside her life, in particular her spiritual life; as Domestico writes, \u201cClampitt was a deeply and complicatedly religious poet.\u201d That was as true of her verse\u2014\u201cthe unction\/of sheer nonexistence,\u201d goes one representative line\u2014as it was of her life, especially after a sudden conversion experience she had at a museum.<\/p>\n

Domestico is an associate professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, where he helps run the Durst Distinguished Lecture Series<\/a>, as well as the books columnist at Commonweal. He is the author of the book Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period (2017), and his criticism has appeared in The Atlantic, The Baffler, Book Post, and The Washington Post, among other publications.<\/p>\n

Domestico and I emailed this week to talk about conversions, late beginnings, and why undergraduates love Elizabeth Bishop.<\/p>\n

Lauren Kane: When were you first introduced to Clampitt\u2019s work? What did you make of it then, and what does it mean to you now?<\/p>\n

Anthony Domestico: I think the first poem I read by Clampitt was \u201cWinchester: The Autumn Equinox,\u201d in an undergraduate seminar on Keats. Keats\u2019s \u201cTo Autumn\u201d was my favorite poem in the world (it still is), and I loved how Clampitt both channeled Keats\u2019s music\u2014\u201chow beautiful\/the season was,\u201d she writes, \u201cay, better than\/the chilly green of spring\u201d\u2014and added her own distinctive notes. The first stanza, for instance, in typical Clampitt fashion, is an eleven-line sentence.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember reading anything else by Clampitt until almost ten years later, when I picked up a couple of her collections at a used bookstore in Chicago. She really doesn\u2019t sound like anyone else, and reading several of her books in a rush confirmed and amplified my affection. Above all, I admire the risks she took in her writing. She was willing to push a sentence past the point you think it would, and maybe should, end. She loved gorgeous language and baroque syntax and was unembarrassed to include those things in her poems. One contemporary critic lamented Clampitt\u2019s \u201cbent toward erudite inebriated nonsense.\u201d I\u2019d say that\u2019s one of the reasons we go to poetry in the first place: to indulge in language, ideas, and music, all to the point of excess. Not many poets achieve a singular style, but Clampitt did, and it\u2019s a style that continues to delight and move me.<\/p>\n

Much of the fascination with her stems from her late-in-life debut. Why do you think such a story holds a particular shine for readers?<\/p>\n

Clampitt\u2019s beloved Keats said that \u201ca Man\u2019s life of any worth is a continual allegory.\u201d For those people who feel that they haven\u2019t accomplished enough yet\u2014which is to say almost all of us!\u2014Clampitt\u2019s life provides an allegory of persistence rewarded. For many, many years, she worked on not particularly good novels and unsuccessful poems. At one point she quits her office job to finally become a writer. A year later she is back at a different office job. She failed and she failed and she failed and then, almost miraculously, she succeeded. Clampitt\u2019s life had sorrows, of course, and not everyone celebrated her success. Mary Karr, for instance, described Clampitt\u2019s poetry as \u201ca parody of the Victorian silk that Pound sought to unravel\u201d: purplish, self-indulgent, fancy to the point of fustiness. But it\u2019s hard not to read the shape of her life optimistically. There\u2019s still time, it seems to tell us.<\/p>\n

Much of your essay is concerned with Clampitt\u2019s conversion experience, which happened at the Cloisters in Manhattan, an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum designed to look like a medieval monastery. What do you think of conversion narratives? What are some of your favorites, both in nonfiction and fiction?<\/p>\n

Conversion narratives fail to be interesting, and they often do, when they\u2019re too neat and tidy. The old self is sloughed off, if not with ease then certainly with finality, and a new and pristine self stands in its stead. That\u2019s generally not how such things happen\u2014and it\u2019s certainly not how Clampitt\u2019s conversion played out. Her experience at the Cloisters in 1956 seemed to change everything: in response, she joined the Episcopal Church and started writing poetry instead of prose. But then things changed back: within a few years she was failing at fiction once again; in 1971 she left the Episcopal Church. Nothing stays put, as she wrote, so central a principle to understanding her that Spiegelman chose the phrase for his biography\u2019s title. Conversion narratives seem truest to me when they recognize that our lives are rarely defined by a single and decisive turn. The opening of Ash-Wednesday, often described as T.S. Eliot\u2019s conversion poem, gets across the stuttering, always-incomplete nature of conversion: \u201cBecause I do not hope to turn again\/Because I do not hope\/Because I do not hope to turn.\u201d<\/p>\n

My favorite conversion narrative is, and probably always will be, Augustine\u2019s Confessions. No one has written more memorably about the tortured desires that can both drive and impede conversion: \u201cLord, make me chaste, but not yet.\u201d The late Fanny Howe\u2019s novel Indivisible (2000) is a strange and wonderful account of a woman\u2019s halting journey toward God; so is Christopher Beha\u2019s What Happened to Sophie Wilder (2012). George Herbert\u2019s perfect poem \u201cLove (III)\u201d describes the push and pull of grace\u2014\u201cLove bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back\/Guilty of dust and sin.\u201d Simone Weil said that while reciting Herbert\u2019s poem to help her deal with a brutal headache, \u201cChrist himself came down and took possession of me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who are some of your favorite writers to teach to undergraduates, and why?<\/p>\n

There are some writers whom I love but have never quite figured out how to teach, perhaps because I feel too close to the material. I tried teaching Marilynne Robinson\u2019s Gilead only once and was unable to bear my students not loving that book as much as I do. But another of my favorite writers, Elizabeth Bishop, is a joy to talk about in class. Her poems can seem uncomplicated\u2014in this one, a speaker describes a fish; in that one, a speaker goes to a gas station\u2014and students don\u2019t feel particularly intimidated by them. And yet the poems are so masterfully composed, so subtle in their tonal and perspectival shifts, that they reward endless unpacking. They are, as Bishop writes of the sea, \u201ccold dark deep and absolutely clear.\u201d Of more recent vintage, Jericho Brown\u2019s The Tradition (2019) helped get my students to see the sonnet as a living, dynamic form, while Lawrence Joseph\u2019s So Where Are We? (2017) demonstrated that poets don\u2019t have to choose between political engagement and formal brilliance.<\/p>\n

I actually teach more prose than poetry. Whenever I\u2019m not teaching Jane Austen, I wish I were: students really care about her novels, and I find that this personal investment often translates into critical attentiveness. The other day a student told me that The Portrait of a Lady, which we read together last year, is now her favorite novel. It\u2019s nice to know that I\u2019ve converted at least one person to the religion of Henry James.<\/p>\n

If someone were to read one poem by Amy Clampitt, what should it be?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an obvious answer, but probably the poem that started her career: \u201cThe Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews.\u201d Everything that makes Clampitt such a wonder\u2014the visual attentiveness, the linguistic extravagance, the syntactic ingenuity\u2014is there. Then move on to her elegy for her father, \u201cBeethoven, Opus III,\u201d a great Midwestern poem and an even greater account of how form transmutes experience into art: \u201cout of a humdrum squalor the levitations.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The poet Amy Clampitt was born in 1920; her first collection of poetry, The Kingfisher, was published in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27454,9,11,10],"class_list":["post-55721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-brief-encounters","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}