Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Willard Spiegelman on Amy Clampitt ("Losing Track of Language")
1.6k Plays2 years ago
How does poetry emerge out of an ordinary life? Willard Spiegelman joins the podcast to talk about "Losing Track of Language," a poem by Amy Clampitt, a poet who was, in the words of our guest, one of the great "late bloomers" in American poetry.
Willard Spiegelman is the author of Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt (Knopf, 2023). He was for many years the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University and the editor of the Southwest Review. He is the author of eight books of literary criticism and writes regularly about art and literature for The Wall Street Journal.
Please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear, and share it with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack to receive a newsletter with each episode.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I am thrilled today to have on an old friend, dear friend, and a brilliant critic, Willard Spiegelman. Willard is our guest today, and he's come on the podcast to talk about a poet about whom he knows a great deal, Amy Clampett. The poem that Willard has chosen for our conversation today is called Losing Track of Language.
00:00:31
Speaker
And you'll be able to find a link to the text of that poem in the episode notes that I make available with the episode wherever you're finding it.
Willard Spiegelman's Career and Contributions
00:00:43
Speaker
Let me tell you a little bit more about our guest today, and then we'll come around to talking about Clampett, of course, and the poem that Willard has chosen for us.
00:00:52
Speaker
Willard Spiegelman was, for many years, the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and the editor of the Southwest Review. He still writes about books and the arts for the Wall Street Journal and does so regularly. And Willard is the author of, I think, eight books of literary criticism and personal essay
00:01:15
Speaker
Most recently, and perhaps certainly relevantly and excitingly for our purposes here, Willard is the author of a book called Nothing Stays Put, the life and poetry of Amy Clampett, a biography of Clampett that was published by Knopf this year, 2023. The book is hot off the presses. I've just received my copy and I'll say more about it soon.
00:01:41
Speaker
But Willard is a wide ranging critic and thinker and writer. He has written academic books like The Didactic Muse, Scenes of Instruction in Contemporary American Poetry, which was published by Princeton in 1989, How Poets See the World, The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry, published by Oxford University Press in 2005.
Approach to Biography and Amy Clampett's Life
00:02:07
Speaker
And he's also, as I suggested a moment ago, published essay collections, books meant for more general readership. I'm thinking of a book like his Seven Pleasures, Essays on Ordinary Happiness, which was published by FSG in 2009. But in addition to the books that Willard has authored himself, he's the editor of Love Amy, the selected letters of Amy Clampett, which came out from Columbia University Press in 2005.
00:02:38
Speaker
Let me say a word about Willard's work here in Nothing Stays Put, which as I say, I received a day or two ago in the mail and proceeded to begin reading immediately and found the genial, pleasurable, generous voice of the person I know there on the page. And it's been a delight to find it there. Willard is
00:03:08
Speaker
a perfect kind of biographer. He's on the one hand modest and reflective about the limits of his knowledge or the knowledge that any biographer might have of a subject, especially a subject who's gone. And yet he's also daring in terms of his own writerly style and reach, his own intelligence.
Transformative Power of Clampett's Poetry
00:03:34
Speaker
Two moments in the prologue to the book stand out to me as indicating some of what I find so disarming and refreshing about Willard's approach. He quotes W.H. Auden
00:03:49
Speaker
early in his book and tells us about Auden's remark. This was a remark that Auden made in giving a lecture as the Oxford Professor of Poetry. Auden said that he would ask himself two questions when reading a poem. The first, quote, here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?
00:04:10
Speaker
And the second, what kind of a guy inhabits this poem? And then Willard goes on to say this about that second question. He did not mean the sum of minute biographical facts about the author, but rather the kind of mind and temperament that we might infer by reasoning back from effect to cause. One wants
00:04:34
Speaker
at least I want, if I'm reading a biography of a poet, to know that the writer in whose hands I have found myself cares not only about the minute particulars of the life of the person whose work has brought me to the book, but cares also about the impression of the life, the kind of implied person created by the poems themselves. And Willard is attentive to that.
00:05:04
Speaker
Having said that, he's also interested in and has done the work, has done the research to know everything he can know about the minute particulars of Amy Clampett's life. And he understands that we will want to know about those too. This brings me to my second point, also from the prologue to Willard's book. Here he's describing
00:05:27
Speaker
what counts as evidence of the life, and he's defending, in a way, his reliance on Clampett's self-reporting about her life, both in prose and in poetry. Willard says this, a writer who is
Amy Clampett's Journey as a Writer
00:05:41
Speaker
bookish defines herself by what she has been reading and thinking about. The inner life, the life of the mind, is as urgent, demanding, and constitutive as the life lived.
00:05:59
Speaker
That seems to me like a salutary point to make in writing a biography. I'm sure it's a pertinent point with respect to Amy Clampett. It also strikes me that it's an interesting self-description of the guest that I have the pleasure of talking to today. That is to say, to read Willard Spiegelman or to talk to him is to be invited into such a bookish life, one that's urgent, demanding,
00:06:25
Speaker
and constitutive of something both lived and livable. And so it's my great pleasure to welcome Willard Spiegelman to Close Readings. Willard, you're joining us from Stonington, Connecticut, a place where I think it must be the place I last saw you in the flesh. How are you doing today? I'm doing very well. I'm delighted to be here. You're introduction to me.
00:06:49
Speaker
left me hungry for more. I think you can just go on for the next hour. Nobody wants to hear that. But let me, if I may, before we get to the poems, please, what you said at the very end of your introduction struck a chord in me, and it has to do with the kind of person Amy Clampett was
00:07:10
Speaker
the kind of life she led, and especially in response to things like the piece in The New Yorker last month about the death or the decline of the English major by Nathan Heller, a piece which made me simultaneously want to put a gun to my head.
00:07:31
Speaker
and also thank God that I got in and out of this profession while the getting was good. I don't think that the kind of life that, this is not unique to Clampett, but the kind of life of a bookish person raised in the 20th century or the 19th century, a life that defined itself artistically through reading as the primary action, is possible
Clampett's Influences and Late Blooming
00:07:56
Speaker
anymore.
00:07:57
Speaker
And as both Heller and his piece and all of my friends who teach in the English departments today say, you can't expect an English major to read Middlemarch or Toby Dick. That's not true, Heller. I have seen English majors do it. I see it all the time. When I was an English major 60 years ago,
00:08:21
Speaker
When i was a senior i took a seminar in henry james we read one novel week one novel week now that was not the only course i was taking i was also taking other courses i don't think kids today have the patience for that but that kind of bookishness.
00:08:40
Speaker
part of the mind and the mindset of people like Amy Clampett, a farm girl who was desperate to escape, who found her own motivation and salvation through reading, which she inherited from her parents and her grandfather, who were all readers.
00:09:00
Speaker
Well, we will, in our own way, I guess this whole enterprise of mine, this podcast, is a way of testing the limits of the attention of contemporary readers, listeners, people. You and I have the advantage, the little secret, it's easier to teach poetry because it's shorter.
00:09:24
Speaker
Marilyn Monroe said, I read poetry because it saves time. And in the classroom, if students come in and they haven't read their 100 pages of whatever it is for that day, there's no discussion. If they're reading a sonnet, well, it's right there on the page and they can make up something as they look at it and go ahead. That's right. So we'll be doing that today. Not quite a sonnet, something a bit longer than that, but we shall make it work. Willard, you've already
00:09:55
Speaker
anticipated at least some of what I wanted to ask you before we get to the poem itself today.
00:10:01
Speaker
which is to give us a little bit of background into Amy Clampett. She's certainly not an obscure name to poetry lovers, certainly not to people who have studied poetry of the 20th century. But she is maybe not a household name by the same token. And so I think some bit of contextualizing might be useful for our audience here.
00:10:29
Speaker
And of course I know that I've just invited onto the podcast somebody who's written a 400 page book about her and could go on for more than the few minutes that I'm granting you here. But if there is a kind of thumbnail version of Clampett's story that will help situate her for our listeners, that would be lovely to hear. And then I'm also curious Willard to know
00:10:54
Speaker
Where or when it was that Clampett first showed up for you as a reader of poetry yourself?
Analysis of 'Losing Track of Language'
00:11:03
Speaker
I'll do the first answer as expeditiously and quickly and smoothly as possible, though I could talk about her for an hour without going too deeply.
00:11:15
Speaker
Her dates are 1928 to 1994. She was the eldest of five children born on a farm. Her parents, her grandparents were Quaker farmers in New Providence, Iowa. She was sort of bookish and eccentric from the start. Her father, the farmer, was the Phi Beta Kappa Classics graduate of Grinnell College.
00:11:37
Speaker
Her mother, unusual for women of that generation, was also a college graduate. She had wanted what is now Michigan State majoring and what something
00:11:47
Speaker
that now would be called Home Ec or some equivalent thereof. And the Clampets had five children. And one of the interesting things, this is their Quaker background, they made sure even in their poverty that there was money for all five of their children, the daughters as well as the sons, to go to college. And in 1937, the very depths of the Depression, Amy went off to Grinnell
00:12:11
Speaker
very eager to find like-minded people. And at the end of freshman year, her father wrote to the dean and said, I don't think Amy can come back because the crops are failing. It's too dry. It's too wet, whatever it is. And they had to work out some arrangement, not uncommon today, a combination of scholarship and work study so that Amy could get through. Much later, she was asked whether she ever considered going east to college. And she said, east, we have no money.
00:12:39
Speaker
But of course, in 1937, very few Americans, most of the men, went to university of any sort. So that's an extraordinary thing right there. She was given to language. She talked early, she read early, and she was never not writing. What is most- Do we know, Willard, what her literary education at Grinnell was like? Oh, yes. I've read the student papers. And they're interesting. You know, a million years ago,
00:13:08
Speaker
Everyone took four semesters of composition. And that was independent of whatever the people were majoring in. But she was writing papers as a freshman and sophomore.
00:13:19
Speaker
of literary analysis, literary criticism, description, in addition to the certain kinds of creative enterprises. One of the interesting things is someone from professors wrote, this sounds like a poem to me. Why aren't you writing poetry? Why are you writing prose? And I'll come to that in a moment. So she was bookish, but she needed to get out. And she set her great goal in life was to live near the ocean.
00:13:46
Speaker
E.B. White and his great essay here is New York, about 1947-48, said there are three kinds of New Yorkers, the ones who are born here, the ones who work here, and the ones who move here. And the greatest version of the New Yorker is the immigrant, the one who comes there, either from Europe or foreign country or from the farm, the small town, the misfits who want to come to where culture and other misfits are.
00:14:12
Speaker
So when Amy was, she got out of college at 20, she had skipped a year in elementary school. She was precocious. She made a beeline to Manhattan and she enrolled in some kind of master's program at Columbia. We don't know what it was. She may have lasted one semester. She may have lasted two. People drop out of graduate school, as we know, even today for a variety of reasons. And then she got a series of jobs.
00:14:39
Speaker
And she fetched up after a couple of years at Oxford University Press, where she rose up to the position of a publicist for the textbook department. But she would have been still in New York, though, working for Oxford in New York, right. She identified herself as a New Yorker for the rest of her life.
00:15:02
Speaker
And she also fetched up to a studio apartment at 354 West 12th Street in 1943, which she held on to until the very end of her life. And it was the kind of Virginia Woolfian room of one's own that every person, especially women, cherish. And that kind of apartment now, it's around the corner from the new and glamorous Whitney Museum. That's out of reach, financial reach of a working girl. It just doesn't happen. They can't live that way.
00:15:31
Speaker
But she had that apartment. And in 1949, she won a contest, an essay contest that OUP sponsored. Why do I want to go to England? So finally, like many Americans of her generation, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, James Wright, all of a sudden the continent had reopened.
00:15:51
Speaker
You know, it had been closed. The 30s were the Depression. The 40s were the war, was the war. And then everybody started going back. And because she had always worshipped English culture and European culture especially, she was eager to go. She spent a month in England. It changed her life. She came back. And after another two years, she quit her job at the press entirely and went back to Europe.
00:16:14
Speaker
for another three-month trip. And from that point on, from 1951 until 1978, she lived in poverty. Her life
00:16:26
Speaker
parts of it are simply unknown to us because she was private. She was secret. She had a circle of friends. There were lovers that were boyfriends. We sort of know some things about them. We sort of don't know things about them, but she was never not writing. And to me, one of the most mysterious and perhaps the most interesting facts about her as a
00:16:50
Speaker
as an artist is the fact that although she was always a writer, she never found her genre until late in life.
00:16:59
Speaker
I call her the patron saint of late bloomers or one of them. I mean, there are many artists who are not discovered until late in life. But Amy thought that to be a writer, a serious writer meant writing novels. Homes were for adolescents. She wrote solids when she was 13 years old, so did her father and grandfather. They wrote solids. But she came to New York and thought, I have to write a novel.
00:17:24
Speaker
Who
Clampett's Connection to Literary Traditions
00:17:25
Speaker
would have been the novelist Willard that would have stood out to her as models for the kind of novelists she wanted to be? She wanted to be Henry James or Hawthorne. But the novelists she most imitated were people like Thomas Wolfe and D.H. Lawrence. And what is interesting to me is this. One of my epigraphs to the book is the Latin motto
00:17:49
Speaker
Poet and Naskator known fit. Poet is born, not made. But in her case, you have to qualify that. She was born as a writer, given the language, but she had to make herself or be made into a poet. And she wrote, it's hard to tell from the papers,
00:18:09
Speaker
She wrote two or three novels, and there are various swathes of other pieces of prose that are parts of these things or versions of these things, which are in her papers at the New York Public Library, and they're just awful. They're awful not because they're ungrammatical, unimaginative, but they don't show the things that a novelist must have, which are two, one.
00:18:35
Speaker
an ability to tell a story with a sense of plot and development. And two, perhaps even more important, an understanding of how people operate, operate both within themselves and between or among themselves in society. She just didn't understand people.
00:18:54
Speaker
I'm jumping forward at the very end. A poet doesn't need those things, Willard. Not necessarily. A poet has to know how she feels or how she works, but you can write a poem without people in it. You can't write a novel without people in it.
00:19:09
Speaker
At the end of her life, she was always committed, especially later in life, to the Wordsworth circle and to Coleridge. She decided to write a play about the Wordsworths. It was dreadful. And at this point, she spent three years on it. And at this point, because she was a famous person,
Language and Identity in Clampett's Poetry
00:19:24
Speaker
People did her favors and gave readings of the play in Boston and Cambridge and the audience all of her friends Eminent literary figures were so embarrassed. They didn't know what to say They were said afterwards things like oh that cast was so good where they read their lines. So well, it was all Plays are about action Poems are not what happened and this is I'm giving you perhaps a Kind of vocational part of her biography here good
00:19:54
Speaker
What happened was her
00:19:59
Speaker
She became a poet with five jolts. And I could read this to you, but it may take up too much of our time. In 1956, when she was 35 years old, Easter week, which is where we are exactly right now, it occurs to me, in March, 1956, she was at the Cloisters in Manhattan. And she was sitting on a stone, and it was piped in Gregorian chant. She was looking at the unicorn tapestries. And all of a sudden, she was struck by a shaft of light.
00:20:29
Speaker
And that dazed her, dazzled her. And she felt it was like a baptism, not of water, but of light. And it really struck her. And she went home. She went out into the gardens and made her way back to the subway and went home. And then a couple of weeks later, a couple of days later, she decided to commit all of this to her notebooks. And she began to write, thinking that she would write a story. And she says,
00:20:58
Speaker
I think I will read this, may I?
Poetry's Intimate Connection and Reflection
00:21:00
Speaker
You may, of course, please do. Let me see if I can find this. Hold on one second. I'm gonna fill some time while you look, Willard.
00:21:08
Speaker
Was she a reader of Dickinson by then? At the time, Dickinson came later. You know why I ask. I'm thinking of a certain slant of light. Well, I use that line. I use that line in the book. She was worshiping the courtly Muses of Europe until another jolt came to her and gave her an American
00:21:30
Speaker
which gave her both Dickinson and Whitman. I think she's the only major 20th century poet to combine very interestingly these two strands from our poetic grandfather and grandmother, Dickinson, and Whitman. Hold on, hold on, hold on.
00:21:57
Speaker
So she's in the cloisters. She sees the light. She wants to write a story about it. And predictably, that story doesn't go very far. And so instead, am I imagining the outcome of this correctly, Willard? She writes a poem? Yes, that's exactly right.
00:22:23
Speaker
I can't find the passage, but the readers will find that. But here's what happens. She sits down to write a story, and all of a sudden, the lines she was writing, the sentences broke into lines of poetry. And then they started looking out for a rhyme. She said, I didn't seek the rhymes, they just came to me. And I found that getting a rhyme
00:22:48
Speaker
was like figuring out the end of a dominant chord in music. It just happened. That was the moment.
Reflection on Amy Clampett's Legacy
00:22:57
Speaker
And then she wrote a perfectly dreadful poem, which was never been published. So that was the first jolt. And then 10 years later, also at that point, I'm going back a moment, she was entering her religious phase. She never did anything by hands, and she was going to commit herself to Anglican theology. She went to a convent,
00:23:20
Speaker
eventually becoming a nun. And she became very serious about Episcopalianism.
00:23:27
Speaker
Ten years later, she gave up the church because she was throwing herself very wholeheartedly into political activism, especially anti-Vietnam stuff, and she was dissatisfied with the way even the left-leaning Episcopal Church of New York City was not as left-leaning and protesting as much as she would want them to, so she gave up the church. She also gave up the church because at that point, she met the man who became her partner
00:23:52
Speaker
for the rest of her life, Columbia law professors, and that was Harold Corn, and all of a sudden she realized, wait a second, and he was Jewish. His mother's family were killed in the camps by the Nazis. She said, wait a second, anti-Semitism is based in Christianity. Christianity has as its basis the hatred of Jews. So she gave up the church.
00:24:17
Speaker
Howe provided her with a kind of emotional stability, and they moved in together. She moved in with him in 1973 on the Upper East Side, and that's when the poems started coming. She gave up fiction writing in 1966. He was the second part of this education. The third part came
00:24:38
Speaker
When in nineteen seventy three they began going every summer to Korea main a little fishing village and that was when she realized that. She could write about Iowa because for her the ocean is just the cornfield in the different media.
00:24:56
Speaker
And that was a very Whitmanian thing and a very Keatsian thing for her to realize. Keats, too, always wanted to live near the sea. He didn't see the sea until he went to Margate briefly, and then he died in Naples and then in Rome. But he wanted to be near the ocean. Amy wanted to be near the ocean. And the other thing was that the main lobsterman with whom she was living for that month reminded her of Iowa farmers.
00:25:24
Speaker
laconic, practical, conservative, in the best sense. The combination of people and landscape opened her up. The third thing that happened with this before... I think we're up to four.
00:25:36
Speaker
I think we're up to four. I think we're up to four. That's right. The fourth thing that happened was that in 1977, in the fall, she took a creative writing course at the new school in the village. Now, the village is filled, was filled with lots of earnest, middle-aged, beat-neck ladies who think they're going to be poets. And at this point, her teacher was a young buck.
00:25:55
Speaker
His name was Daniel Gabriel. He's my age. He now lives in Berlin. He's lived in Germany for many years, and he was rough and tumble. He was American. He was Whitman. He was Muriel Ruckheiser. He was lefty, and he thought Amy was just full of hot air, and they sort of banged heads. Now, I once asked him, I couldn't ask her, whether
00:26:19
Speaker
another teacher would have had the same effect on her. The old Zen motto is, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And I think that Amy was ready. And so almost any course she was in would have done this job for her. But the fact that she was up against somebody and sort of banging heads with them maybe made her stronger in her own conviction. So that's 1977. And the last piece of what made her a puzzle
00:26:47
Speaker
There are three things that constitute- You said what made her a puzzle, Willard. I'm sorry. Which is a lovely Freudian slur. No, no. She was a puzzle that made her a success, made her a success, was this. The three things that constitute success in life are talent, she had talent, determination, she was never not writing, and luck, which is the one thing that you cannot control.
00:27:15
Speaker
In the 70s, she was doing freelance editing for a man named Jack McRae, who was the head of Dutton Publishing. He just died last month, the age of 93. He was universally regarded as the best-looking man in publishing, and he was an old Harvard wasp preppy.
00:27:34
Speaker
a kind of renaissance dilettante and he and Amy were a perfect match because he was charming and bright and she was diligent and she was the best editor he ever had especially with scientific texts and he trusted her judgment well at one point she must have told him that she was a writer he said let me see what you have written she showed him some of her fiction he said this is dreadful she said well I'm also writing poems so he
00:28:03
Speaker
she gave him some of her poems. And he sent them to his friend, the poetry editor of the New Yorker, Howard Moss. And Moss said, well, these are pretty good, but they're not quite right for us. That's the damning with faint craze that the editor will always use. And so McCrae said, well, I'll send you some more. And he sent some more.
00:28:25
Speaker
and Howard liked one of them. So Amy has the perhaps unique experience of coming home one day and finding a letter of acceptance of a poem she had no idea had been submitted. And that's when she broke into the New Yorker in 1978. And that's when I, now this answer is the second part of the question. That's how I, like many people, became aware of her. And when her poems, and they started rolling out in the New Yorker and then everywhere,
00:28:52
Speaker
When these appeared on the scene between 1978 and then the publication of the first book in 1983, people said, who is this? No one was writing poems like this for a long time. The modes of the 60s and the 70s, especially after Robert Lowell became less baroque and more confessional, the modes were for plain speech, regardless of subject matter,
00:29:21
Speaker
or confessional outpourings. And Clampus poems were not like this. They were rich.
00:29:32
Speaker
A friend of mine once said years ago, sitting down and reading her poems is like eating a meal composed entirely of desserts. They are very rich. And she once said in letters to her brother and sister in her days of poverty in the 50s and 60s, this is part of her Iowa upbringing and her Quaker ease of dealing with matters of poverty, she said, I know how to live poor.
00:29:59
Speaker
And perhaps in compensation for that, she learned how to write rich. Her earliest favorite poet was Keats.
00:30:08
Speaker
who was a great poet of compensation. And she once said, you can't really understand the eve of St. Agnes unless you know what it's like to be cold. And she grew up in a house without central heating and in winter it was cold. So she knew how Madeline felt. Her other early favorite poet
00:30:30
Speaker
Well, and let's say Vincent Millay was an early favorite because Amy was a teenage girl. When she got to New York in 1941, the first book of poems she bought was by Gerard Manley Hopkins, another person who knew how to convert poverty into richness. Sure. Well, Keats and Hopkins both have been subjects of previous conversations in this series. And, you know, it was in the conversation I had about Hopkins with Maya Sipopa.
00:30:59
Speaker
We talked about the great poem, Spring and Fall. Keats came up in that regard, too, that Hopkins seemed to be a poet who had taken Keats's advice written in his letter to Shelley near the end of Keats's life to load every rift with ore. That is the sense of a poetry that is jammed full, as full as it can be of the poet's material.
00:31:27
Speaker
So it makes sense to me that to hear you describe Clampett in this way. Willard, I think we could go on talking about her life. And I hope that we'll have occasion to wind our way back to her life in meaningful ways as our conversation goes on. But it strikes me that we're well enough into this conversation that we'd better give our listeners an example of her poetry to listen to. And I wonder if I could ask you,
00:31:55
Speaker
to be the one to read the poem that you've chosen for this conversation, losing track of language for our listeners now. Would you be willing to do so, Willard? Willard, I think you've muted yourself.
00:32:21
Speaker
Yes, there I am. There, you are back now. I had a moment of panic, but the moment has been averted. Okay, so Willard, read her poem to us. Okay, this is the second of her five volumes of poems from Kenneth called What the Light Was Like. This is called Losing Track of Language. It's about a train trip. The train leaps toward Italy.
00:32:49
Speaker
The French Riviera falls away in the dark. The rails sing dimeter shifting to trimeter, a gallopade to a galley yard. We sit wedged among strangers. Whatever we once knew, it was never much of each other, falls away with the landscape. Words fall away. We trade instead in flirting and cigarettes. We're all rapport with strangers.
00:33:20
Speaker
The one with the yellow forelock that keeps falling and being shaken back again, syncopating the dimmitter-trimmitter gallopade into Galliard, is, it seems, Italian. Recently a pilgrim to the Vaucluse, where Petrarca, to the noise of waterfalls, measured out his strict stanzas, little rooms for turmoil to grow lucid in,
00:33:46
Speaker
for change to put on more durable leaves of bronze, a scapular of marble. A splutter of pleasure adhering the name is all he needs, and he's off like a racehorse at the paleo, plunging unbridled into recited cadenzas, thick, I'm sorry, plunging unbridled into recited cadenzas, three beat lines interleaving a liquid pentameter.
00:34:15
Speaker
What are words? They fall away into the fleeing dark of the French Riviera, as once a shower of bloom, una Pioggia di Fiord, descended into the lap of the Trecento. Her hair, all gold and pearl, the grass still warm as when she sat there six centuries gone by, that squandered heartbeat,
00:34:43
Speaker
The black plague took her, young, now fossilized as bronze, as carved laurel. Whatever is left of her is language. And what is language that breath leaves, petals fallen, or in the act of falling, pollen of turmoil that sifts through the fingers? Econosha!
00:35:11
Speaker
I ask it to keep the torrent of words from ending, to keep anything from ending ever. Anquet saffo? Yes, he knows, he will oblige. The liquid pentameter gives way to something harsher. Diphthongs condense, take on an edge of bronze. Though I don't understand a word, what are words?
00:35:38
Speaker
Do these concern one Timus, led before she was married, or so one leaf of what's left would have it, to the dark bedroom of Persephone, for so long nowhere at home, either here or there, forever returning and falling back again into the dark of these 10,000 years? The train leaps toward Italy. Words fall away through the dark,
00:36:06
Speaker
into the dark bedroom of everything left behind, the unendingness of things lost track of, of who, of where, where I'm losing track of language. Well, that was beautifully done. Thank you, Willard.
00:36:23
Speaker
Thank you. I'm sorry for the little blip in the middle. And maybe I should just offer a little bit of. The blip is what makes it human. That's how we know. What about a little bit of footnoting your readers? Well, yeah, I was going to ask for that. So help us. Help us find what are the things that need glossing? Well, petroir.
00:36:42
Speaker
Well, before Petrarch, the Gallipade and the Galliard are both dance forms. The Gallipade is an 18th century form, which involves lots of leaping. It's also known as a gallop and it's a two beat dance. And a Galliard is an older Renaissance kind of dance, which involves a triple meter with leaps and jumps. And
00:37:05
Speaker
I suppose what she's trying to do is to imitate the sounds of what she hears in the tracks beneath her.
00:37:20
Speaker
You hear that a little bit in some of the, you know, she's not a regular formal poet, but a splutter of pleasure at hearing the name. A splutter of pleasure at hearing the name is all he needs and he's off like a racehorse at the polio. The great horse race in Siena.
00:37:40
Speaker
And Petrarch, of course, the man who, as I learned in junior high school, invented the Renaissance, climbing the mountain just to see the view. And that's how the Renaissance began. That's how humanism began, according to my junior high school teachers. Fair enough. That's as good as anything else. That seems like good authority. But he also, we might say, invented the sonnet, devoted to his beloved Laura.
00:38:06
Speaker
who's sort of introduced without being named in the second stanza of this poem that she's being described.
00:38:17
Speaker
and he once described her as a shower of bloom, Una Pioggia di Fiord, a rain shower of blooming. And so it's interesting, this poem has three stanzas. They are 18 lines long. And that's an interesting form. There is a form called the heroic sonnet, a dumb road one. It's 18 lines of quatrains.
00:38:44
Speaker
Why did she pick eighteen? It's longer than a sonnet, it's shorter than something else. And she has three of them, and one is devoted to the train, and then the next two are devoted with interleavings to the two poets whom she is talking about or talking to her companion about.
00:39:07
Speaker
One is Italian and then the third is Greek. So she goes from Petrarch and the Renaissance to Sappho and archaic Greece. Do you know a conocia? On case a foe. Do you also know Sappho? Yes in Italian. Yes in Italian I asked her to keep the torrent of words from ending to keep anything from ending ever remember that
00:39:32
Speaker
This is on a train trip, and it's going, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum. And she, who was by her own admission a garrulous creature, loves language and wants the torrent of words to keep going on and on and on. And they are in English, they are in Italian, they are a little bit in Greek. She doesn't understand the Greek, but what are words? What are words?
00:39:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, so we'll come back to that. But maybe just in the spirit of contextualizing things for people, as you did with Petrarch, is it worth saying a word about what Sappho would have meant to someone on a train in the middle of the 20th century in going from France to Italy? Like, what did Sappho stand for in the European imagination at that time? Or what should we know about Sappho that might be relevant to this poem?
00:40:28
Speaker
Sappho is the great, the 10th muse. Sappho is the great Greek woman, lyric poet, very few of whose words still, or let me repeat that.
00:40:48
Speaker
Only words and fragments and leaves of Sappho exist, little pieces, little leaves, little fragments. Only a couple of poems survive intact. And one of her poems is about Timas, the girl who died before her wedding day, who goes to the bedroom of Persephone,
00:41:12
Speaker
underneath to be the bride of Pluto. And I have actually, I'll give you, I found on the web one very nice eight line translation of that into modern English. This dust was Timas and they say that almost on her wedding day, she found her bridal home to be the dark house of Persephone.
00:41:38
Speaker
And many maidens, knowing then that she would not come back again, unbound their curls, and all in tears, they cut them off with sharpened shears. A female lyric poet, I mean, that's what she would have been, I think, especially to somebody like Clampett, who, late in life, in part to honor her father, went back to learn Greek.
00:42:05
Speaker
at the new school and then at Hunter College in 1982. She wanted to learn Greek. She didn't think that she was properly educated until she could know Greek. And so I've got the chronology right. So that would have been well after the incident that's memorialized by this poem. But
00:42:28
Speaker
closer in time to the writing of the poem. Have I got that right, Willard? That this poem, in other words, describes a train journey that she took in the fifties, but she didn't write the poem until the eighties? Is that right? That's right. I found the germ of this poem in her travel books or journals.
00:42:54
Speaker
that were compiled in 1951 and 52, which, like her novels, she tried to get published, but failed to. And I'll read you, and this is very interesting, because the original prose version of this, first of all, and this shouldn't make too much difference, she's writing about her not going from Italy to France,
00:43:21
Speaker
Not going from France to Italy, but going back to France from Italy. I see. That's the germ. Oh, so she's changed the direction of the trip for the poem. She's changed the direction of the trip. That's interesting. We'll come back to that. It may be, it may be. As she was going back to France from Italy, she said she felt like a snake shedding one skin to reveal another or a sleight of hand artist changing costumes. And here's her line.
00:43:50
Speaker
in the journal, the spell of his language, she's talking about the guy sharing the compartment with, the spell of his language still hung upon me like a beautiful and inappropriate mantle of which it was necessary to be divested before I could pull together enough shreds of French to ask for a hotel room. And I commented in my book
00:44:17
Speaker
The spinning of similes and metaphors, snake, costume changes, beautiful and an appropriate mantle, shreds of French, tells us that a poet with her natural gift for metaphor has been doing the writing and that she will rediscover herself, but not for a while. She had other mantles to put on and remove and other skins to shed. I'm going to make the awful joke so you don't have to. She was a poet and she didn't know it, will it?
00:44:46
Speaker
Well, you know, that's absolutely true. And she used to have little dinner parties in her in her fifth story walk up and her friends, her girlfriends would come over and they would have a kind of meal and have some wine. And Amy would read from her novels, her work in progress. And then the women would all leave and go down to the subway or walk home and they would all shake their heads and say, Amy's a poet. She's not a novel writer.
00:45:11
Speaker
She was the last to know. Yeah, I suppose so. Before we dive in, and I'd like to be able to spend some time with you on each of the three stanzas that you've described, I just want to linger a bit longer over what you noted as the perhaps unusual, but in any case, regular or
00:45:34
Speaker
apparently intentional structural division of the poem into these three long stances. So I guess what's the question? Was that characteristic of Amy Clampett?
00:45:48
Speaker
to write in that way. She's referring in the first couple lines of the poem and you so beautifully demonstrated what she might have been hearing and trying to describe to dimmiter and trimeter, but her poem itself doesn't seem to me anyway to be in any kind of regular meter. But she does have this
00:46:08
Speaker
I mean, this sense of structural division into three equal parts, and I'm wondering if that tells you, Willard, something about the way her imagination works or the way she's trying to render experience. Perhaps. One thing we know about her poetry
00:46:27
Speaker
I'm not going to qualify this. Several things we know about her poetry are this. First, she liked rich diction. Second, her poems are often a little short on action, but very heavy on lists and nouns. This is something she owes to or at least shares with Whitman. Third,
00:46:49
Speaker
She wrote more poems that are one sentence long than any other contemporary poet. Though, of course, many of those sentences, depends on how you really define a sentence, many of those sentences are caught up with semicolons. So they could be otherwise. In other words, she had a tendency for chunkiness.
00:47:13
Speaker
blocks. And I think here she wants to give you the sense of three solid blocks at first that are standing in
00:47:26
Speaker
contrast to the ongoing movement of the trip that she's taking. The dumb literalist in me wants to see them even as cars of a train or something like that, but perhaps that's stretching the kind of mimetic analogy too far. Well, she talks about stanzas as rooms for things to grow light
00:47:50
Speaker
in. Yeah. These are rather elongated rooms. These are elongated rooms. They are sort of longer than a sonnet. They're not quite a heroic sonnet. They're not rhyme quatrains. She did use rhyme sometimes very strictly. She did write sonnets and sometimes very loosely. Right.
00:48:11
Speaker
Okay, so here's another question for you then, Willard, that situates us for the time being anyway more firmly in the first of these three stanzas. You've already said some really lovely things about those first three lines, but my question comes immediately after them. I'll read the lines again, and then I have a question for you about them.
00:48:33
Speaker
We sit wedged among strangers, whatever we once knew, it was never much, of each other, falls away with the landscape. Words fall away. We trade instead in flirting and cigarettes. We're all rapport with strangers." I'm struck by that double falls away, or first it's falls away and then it's fall away, the plural version of the verb. So knowledge falls away.
00:49:01
Speaker
then words fall away and what replace knowledge and words are flirting and cigarettes. We're poor with strangers.
00:49:14
Speaker
You've described Clampett as a poet who is, and perhaps this wasn't exactly the word you used, but is fond of a kind of ornate diction. She's a lover of words. We have evidence of that already in the Gallipede and Galliard and so forth. But here it seems as though something is coming,
00:49:37
Speaker
that is, she's making a claim, maybe you don't believe it, that words are falling away and something else that seems very much unlike them, flirting and cigarettes, I don't know, maybe they're not so unlike, comes to replace words and knowledge. So talk about that moment, Willard, and what flirting and cigarettes are doing here.
00:49:56
Speaker
Okay, for one thing, I think you're a little bit wrong. For Clampett, this is a fairly chaste poem. This is not as wordy or as rich or as dense as a lot of the others. And I think that's because she is paying perhaps two kinds of homage
00:50:16
Speaker
to Elizabeth Bishop, whom she liked very much as a poet. And it's interesting from the historical point of view, Elizabeth Bishop died just as Amy Clampett was coming up. This is the very late 70s.
00:50:34
Speaker
One of the things that Clampett liked, she loved travel, she hated flying. All of her trips to Europe, with very few exceptions, were done by boat, and all of her trips in the United States were done by train, or even better, by bus. She loved bus rides.
00:50:51
Speaker
Are you going to talk about The Moose? I hope so. And one of the greatest bus ride poems in English is The Moose, of course. And so this is her version. And there are other bus ride poems that she writes that really do have that same component. And this goes back in part.
00:51:09
Speaker
to her Quaker-ness. A bus ride is a packed container, oh, like a stanza, in which there are many people or some people who constitute a kind of community. Think about Quaker meeting, people sitting together in silence until the moment when one person wants to speak. So there is unity and individuality, there is speech and silence
00:51:36
Speaker
either simultaneously or consecutively. And there's also, in regard to the homage to Bishop, look at that little parenthetical. Whatever we knew, it was never much. Now Bishop is the great
00:51:54
Speaker
What is this feeling? We all feel this great sensation of joy. Bishop was the great poet of the unexpected but perfectly natural parenthetical phrase, and I'm sure Clampett is aware of that here. Now here's a difference though between the moose and that kind of journey in this. What Bishop overhears in that poem
00:52:18
Speaker
And I'll make that poem available to listeners here if you don't know it. It may be my favorite poem of all the poems there are. What Bishop overhears is not somebody reciting Petrarch or Sappho, but kind of ordinary, homely, non-poetic conversation, which- Barely heard, overheard. Right, right.
00:52:42
Speaker
She doesn't hear anything like the kind of performance. She doesn't engage with the other riders of the bus. She's a kind of almost invisible overhearer. What's John Stuart Mill? Right. Poetry overheard. Right. Right. So this feels I take your point that there is perhaps a kind of homage to Bishop here, but there seems to be another kind of energy at work as well that's interested in a kind of
00:53:12
Speaker
liveliness or engagement with poetic tradition as such, you know? There's that. And there's also, again, going back to the knowledge of the woman, she was jittery and nervous and everybody described her as bird-like. She was very enthusiastic and fluttery. And when she read her poems, she almost sounded like a little girl the way Marilyn Monroe would have sounded had she had her great dream of becoming an intellectual. And
00:53:39
Speaker
she had to develop breath control to articulate those very long sentences that I've described. But this is a kind of social scene. We don't know the man with whom she's traveling. I mean, maybe it was a boyfriend she picked up en route. He's not even part of the equation. He drops out of the poem as soon as he appears for the appearance of this other person who comes in. And I think it's because, and this is another difference between her and Bishop,
00:54:09
Speaker
Amy was a real kind of intellectual in the way that Bishop wasn't. I mean, she was bookish in that very academic way. And so her life was formed with books and in language. So when she hears somebody or meets somebody with whom she can enthuse about Petrarch or about Sappho, this is a kind of electric and almost sexual thrill that she's receiving. A splutter of pleasure.
00:54:38
Speaker
splutter of pleasure is all that he needs, all that she needs, too. Yeah. How do you hear, Willard, the tone of this? I mean, I'm imagining other kinds of possible poetic versions of this train ride.
00:54:59
Speaker
in which the man who takes center stage to recite Petrarch is ironized or lampooned in some way. That doesn't seem to be the tone here. How do you understand the
00:55:17
Speaker
the kind of stance that the implied Amy Clampett, who is the poet here, takes towards this man and his pleasure in reciting these lines. Does she share it? Where does she stand in relation to it?
00:55:36
Speaker
I think this is a dream come true, and I think irony is about as far away as anything could be. She once said in a letter, I don't understand why people are so afraid of seeming enthusiastic about things. And this is a great passion for her. And again, it has to do, I think, with something I said, or is related to something I said before, for a life that had been lived in poverty.
00:55:59
Speaker
for a life that had been lived away from culture, from what she thought of as the bed of Western culture in Europe. This is making the past come alive to her in very vibrant ways, because she doesn't want the torrent of words from ending. She wants to keep everything going at this intense pace forever. And so one of the points of balance in the poem
00:56:30
Speaker
is the balance between the ongoing movement of the train and the ongoing movement of the language, the torrent that is coming out, and torrent picks up the word of the shower of bloom from earlier on. All of this energy and all of this beautiful outpouring of language and bookishness
00:56:55
Speaker
against her understanding that everything is being lost at the same time. And one way to measure the wholeness or the integrity of the poem is just to trace through it all of the words that are either related to fall, fell, falling, or loss, losing,
00:57:21
Speaker
And then with leaves and left in there, you know, it's about nature and it's about history and the processes of loss and rebirth and reimagining or metamorphosing into something solid. And the solidness can be scapular of marble, more adorable leaves of bronze, more
00:57:50
Speaker
the pages of a book, the leaves of a book, or the leaves that have been left even from the minuscule number of words we have from Sappho herself. Right. Or the transformation of Laura, Petrarch's Laura, into all gold and pearl, but then also into language. That's right.
00:58:15
Speaker
And this brings me, so these are lines from the end of the second stanza, and they follow, well, there's this kind of repeated question that's asked in the poem, it's asked both in the second and in the third stanza, what are words? The,
00:58:37
Speaker
That question is followed by this description of Laura, who is not only the object of Petrarch's love, but also is memorialized or elegized in Petrarch's poems, too. Whatever is left of her is language. And what is language with breath but breath, leaves, petals fallen, or in the act of falling, pollen of turmoil that sifts through the fingers?
00:59:07
Speaker
Willard, can you gloss those lines for us? What is that showing you about what language meant to this poet? I think it meant everything to this poet, but we also are alert to the fact that language is present orally
00:59:35
Speaker
but also literally on a page. What is left of Laura is words, but these are words we read. She's in the process now of hearing and speaking words, and those words are ephemeral and evanescent, like any physical experience, whereas the words here
01:00:01
Speaker
are more written down than pollen of turmoil that sifts through the fingers. And earlier you referred to the recognition that Clampett seems to be operating under that all here is being lost, that experience as soon as it's had is evanescent, to use the word that you just used.
01:00:27
Speaker
I suppose it's the kind of speed of the train's progress through the landscape that is making that seem kind of literal and evident and obvious to clamp it and the others on the train, that whatever is taken in through the windows of the train, in other words, is immediately gone and then immediately gone again and so forth. But that language feels like that also, that one hears it and it's gone.
01:00:52
Speaker
Well, and this is why that sentence I read from her journal about a snake shedding a skin or changing a costume from one outfit to another.
01:01:08
Speaker
is the equivalent in a different form of changing languages. I mean, I think that for her, a community of polyglots would be heaven on earth in which people were all speaking. And actually there's a pendant poem to this written years later called Babel on the, what is it called? I'll find this for you in a moment.
01:01:36
Speaker
Well, sorry, and I think you've just muted yourself again, Willard inadvertently there, but the, you know, it strikes me that there is
01:01:47
Speaker
Here I am, here I am. Yeah, no, you're here and I hear you. Let me just give you this table aboard the Hellas International Express. It was a kind of nightmare poem on a train filled with strangers and people who are yelling and screaming and passports are taken away and people are smoking and the toilets aren't working. And it's just dreadful. And this was a train trip she made in the 80s.
01:02:13
Speaker
with her friend, an actor named Peter Kyboy, and it was going from Greece up into Munich, and it was going through the Balkans. It was the kind of thing that's fun to read about, but I think most of us would rather die than take that kind of train trip. But there it was. It was Babel. It was just all Babel in a million Serbian tongues and dialects.
01:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, well, here we have the French Riviera. We have Italian. We have, of course, Greek in the form of Sappho represented as well. You'd pointed out earlier that she's reversed the direction of the trip, of the original trip. And rather than writing the poem about a trip from Italy back to France, she's doing it the other way around. And I said, oh, that seems interesting to me. I'll lay cards on the table here and see what you think of them.
01:03:02
Speaker
That allows her to move from France through Italy, and ultimately the journey that isn't taking her there, the poetic journey, the stanzas are, to Greece. To me, that suggests a kind of keeping in mind the way you described Clampett's fascination with European culture and the kind of canonical unfolding that one inherits,
01:03:31
Speaker
a movement back in time, back through stages of what Clampett might have taken to be the kind of pinnacles of European civilization or something, going back to a source rather than from the past into the future. She's moving west to east, in other words, back to Greece. Does that strike you as a kind of ambition she might have felt?
01:03:59
Speaker
Yes, it could it could also be a mistake on her part that sure miss miss remembering this well Think of it this way. We're talking about crossings heterarch went from Italy to France and back and Clampett is going from France to Italy and back and
01:04:27
Speaker
Grease is still out of the picture in terms of her real life, both in this poem and in her actual life at this point in 1951 or whenever it is that the poem took place. But it's there in her bookish life to go back to that. It's there in her bookish life. It's there in her imagination, sure.
01:04:46
Speaker
So let's let yeah. Oh, sorry. Did you have another film? No, no, no, no. Okay. Yeah. No, but then, you know, I'd want to hear you say something about the way the poem ends. Well, it ends and this would be perhaps a an unconscious homage on her part to what
01:05:07
Speaker
M.H. Abrams called the romantic nature lyric a poem like Tintern Abbey or Frost at Midnight, or this Lime Tree Bower in my prison, which rounds back to its beginning at its ending.
01:05:25
Speaker
So the poem ends in a kind of circular fashion, backward begins, which is another way of answering your question about west to east and east to west, and does it make any difference? But it ends with the repetition of the opening line. The train leaps toward Italy. Right. Words fall away. And everything is falling away. And there's a sense of
01:05:50
Speaker
vertigo at the end. I mean, the falling and the leaving and what has been left behind and what has been lost is countered by what is gained. The poem ends almost with the word unendingness. So you have a sense of something ongoing, the unendingness of things lost track of, of who, of where,
01:06:20
Speaker
where I'm losing track of language. I think there is a sense that all of this stew, I'll use the word babble, but it's not quite that, all of this stew is a very rich meal for her to eat, the combination of English and Italian and Greek, and she's losing track of it, but she's also gaining traction.
01:06:49
Speaker
through language, because language is what is providing the point of contact between her and this man whom she meets on the train, whom presumably she will ever see again, whose name she doesn't know. The one with the yellow forelock. It's an interesting description he gets.
01:07:11
Speaker
Well, she's talked about the horse race at the polio. Yeah, maybe. So here you have a four lock. Maybe that's it. Yeah, I want to linger just a moment longer before we end today on the phrase losing track of language and to think about what that might mean. I suppose if you're
01:07:35
Speaker
If you're attending to a bit of language long enough, it may begin to not make sense to you anymore, or it may sound less like meaningful utterance and more like ambient music or something like that.
01:07:52
Speaker
Certainly we're in a context on this train, as we've already described, that's multilingual and that maybe that creates a kind of, like you said in referring to the companion piece, a kind of babble-like confusion or the potentiality of such a thing. But I think what I'm hearing you describe is a kind of, apparently,
01:08:19
Speaker
paradoxical feature of what it means to be a poet for Clampett, which is that somehow for her, losing track of language is part of what constitutes the art of poetry. And that would sound, I think,
01:08:37
Speaker
almost nonsensical to somebody who didn't have the context of this poem or the context that you've provided to make sense of it, but it begins to make sense to me now. Can you say more, Willard, about the phrase losing track of language and why Clampett might have been so attached to it? It seems like a curious thing for a poet to celebrate. We use the phrase losing track of
01:09:10
Speaker
to refer to various kinds of things. I'm losing track of where it was you meant to travel. I'm going back to Elizabeth Bishop. I'm losing track of the right direction. It suggests that you've been following something. You've been following and you've lost it. And I've lost track of it. Or you're on the trail of something and then you've lost the center, you've lost the track.
01:09:40
Speaker
And there must be some pun here on the train tracks, but go on. Sure, for sure. Sure. I mean, that's right. That's right. The track, the track, going down the track, going down the track suggests a specific destination that you were going to. I'm losing track of this. I'm gaining. I think the poem is deliberately intended
01:10:08
Speaker
to show how loss and gain function either simultaneously or sequentially. If Robert Frost says poetry is what is lost in translation, we can say that language, we can say that understanding is what is gained when you don't understand the language. I mean, this is what Eliot meant when he said, poetry can be understood before it is,
01:10:38
Speaker
Poetry can be communicated before it is understood. So there's a little bit of understanding because she knows enough of romance languages.
01:10:51
Speaker
to know French and Italian, but they're not natural to her. It's like shedding the garment, putting on a new suit of clothes. And the other thing is I think we all, unless we were perfectly bilingual, have the sense when engaged or trying to engage in a conversation in a foreign tongue of just becoming flummoxed and
01:11:16
Speaker
sort of desperately reaching or grasping for a cognate. And if it's not the right word, maybe you come up with something in a kind of franglais or something that's half this and half that, because learning a language can be terribly tiring. But sounds also... Exhausting. And that's what... She's expressing a sense of exhilaration that has a concomitant sense of exhaustion.
01:11:45
Speaker
Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, that's that's lovely. And, you know, it makes me think that when when, you know, when language when when we struggle to make sense of it or to follow it, perhaps because the language isn't our first language or perhaps because we're exhausted and on a train and and we've lost track of the conversation. It strikes me that what might happen in the wake of that loss is the kind of
01:12:11
Speaker
language ceases to be referential and instead becomes like thing-like itself, right? It becomes the, just in that beautiful way you were doing at the beginning of our discussion of this poem, helping us see the way the sound of the train on the tracks was producing a kind of dimeter or trimeter. It sounds like the discourse that's coming out of this man on the train is itself producing a kind of sound that she is going to keep, even if she's missing its meaning.
01:12:42
Speaker
I think that's right. And also to go back perhaps to the moose, when Bishop says, we feel, we all feel this sweet sensation of joy, that nice parenthetical remark. Remember what Clampett says here in the penultimate line is that one of the things, some of the things she's losing track of are of who, of where.
01:13:08
Speaker
And that losing track of where we are, that explains perhaps the confusion about Italy and France and where the border is and when do you turn off your French and turn on your Italian. And who am I in all of this? Here she is. She has essentially lost her own identity, perhaps subsuming it into the conversation with a perfect stranger. Sounds like a kind of- With whom she's all rapport. Yeah.
01:13:37
Speaker
I don't want to say it's a moment of grace, but it's a moment of coming together. And I'm reminded, one of my favorite poets, again, somebody recently dead, who is probably not much red, at least in this country, is the Englishman Charles Tomlinson, who has a wonderful poem called The Chances of Rime, which begins, the chances of rhyme are like the chances of finding.
01:14:03
Speaker
in the finding fortuitous but once found binding." I misquoted that. The chances of rhyme are like the chances of meeting in the finding fortuitous but once found binding. So that's sort of what
01:14:20
Speaker
Clampett was saying about how when she was writing these lines down in the yeah the cloisters the rhymes just came right and so here she meets a stranger and all of a sudden there's a kind of explosion of energy through language and reference and flirting and cigarettes and and almost the kind of adolescent but not just adolescents have this that feeling you might have and
01:14:46
Speaker
when you meet somebody for the first time, and there may be romance or sexuality involved in all of this. And on the one hand, there's a great immediate sense of intimacy. I feel I've known this person all my life. On the other hand, since it's a total stranger, everything that person says or does or confesses to you is new.
01:15:11
Speaker
And if you have met this person on a train, or on a plane, or a bus, or whatever.
01:15:26
Speaker
There is the added license that comes with the recognition that you will probably never see them again or talk to them again. That's part of what produces that sudden intimacy, I think. Maybe, as a final observation here, we can say that there's that interesting lurking theory here that the intimacy created between a poet and her reader can feel like that.
01:15:52
Speaker
Oh, that's very nice. That sudden kind of intimacy, which will end not as soon as you get off the train, but as soon as you close the book. We sit wedged among strangers. That's right. And wedging produces intimacy. It sure does.
01:16:14
Speaker
Well, that's lovely, Willard. I don't think I can add anything to that. And I want to thank you for the conversation. I've really enjoyed it. It's been a pleasure and a privilege for me to learn about Amy Clampett with you. And I hope that if nothing else, this conversation will send
01:16:32
Speaker
some of our listeners to your book and to Clampett's poems, of course. Especially to hers. This is my zealot's mission in life. Good, good. Well, I'm happy to have taken advantage of your sense of purpose in drafting you onto the podcast to spread the word of Amy Clampett.
01:16:56
Speaker
Willard Spiegelman, thank you very much. And dear listeners, thank you for making it on this journey with us. I'll have more for you soon.