Nothing Stays Put

The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt

By: Willard Spiegelman

Narrated by: Arthur Morey, Cassandra Campbell

An evocative portrait of the beloved and acclaimed poet, whose late-in-life success took the literary world by storm.

With the publication of her first book of poems in her sixty-third year, Amy Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, launching herself from obscurity to the upper ranks of American poetry all but overnight, and living a whirlwind eleven years, until her death in 1994. Years later, as renowned poetry scholar Willard Spiegelman wades into her papers and poems, he discovers a woman of dazzling intellect, staunch progressive politics, and an inexhaustible sense of wonder for the world and the words we’ve invented to describe it.

Giving equal weight to the life and the poetry, Spiegelman untangles Clampitt’s famously allusive lines to reveal the experiences they emerged from, pulling the curtain back on her nearly four decades of artistic anonymity, and in doing so assembling a rich period piece of Manhattan during the days in which Clampitt worked for Oxford University Press and the National Audubon Society—writing cheery, discursive office memos, and two novels that never got published, before hitting her stride in verse.

Nothing Stays Put is a gift to poetry fans, an inspiration to artists striving at any age, and an ode to this most unlikely of literary celebrities, who would publish five acclaimed books and win a MacArthur “Genius Grant” nearly all in the final decade of her life.

Cover photograph (inset) courtesy of the Amy Clampitt Foundation. Amy Clampitt papers, Berg Collection, NYPL; (background) blue cornflowers. shapencolour/Alamy

©2023 Willard Spiegelman (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"“Clampitt comes to life here . . . Spiegelman’s Nothing Stays Put embodies a different kind of investigation, not surveillance but a thoughtful examination that at times still spins off into a kind of awe.” —Carol Muske-Dukes, The Washington Post

“One comes away from this book moved and inspired. Spiegelman’s prose is elegant and understated, and his research quietly impressive . . . One of the pleasures of this biography is watching Spiegelman keep pace with his subject’s roving, hungry mind. His insistence upon treating Clampitt as the curious and generous intellectual she was is commendable and refreshing . . . Spiegelman’s close readings of Clampitt’s poems, too, are always illuminating . . . Clampitt is lucky to have the attention of such a sympathetic, literary biographer.” —Heather Clark, Poetry Foundation

“An insightful and enthralling account of Clampitt’s exquisite art and her long journey from virtual obscurity to poetic celebrity . . . [An] astute analysis of [Clampitt’s] poems that truly satisfies . . . A detailed portrait of an independent spirit and a remarkable poet.” —Malcolm Forbes, The Wall Street Journal

Single reader would have been better.

Although the use of two readers is unique and was done smoothly in this production, it would have been better to have one reader, preferably male since the author is male, and since the author sometimes uses the first person in this book. Listeners and readers are more accustomed to bridging the reading of character transitions and quotations than they are absorbing an actual voice transition during a reading.

This production was good, but I would have preferred a single voice.