With the publication of her first book of poems in her 63rd 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 she died 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.

Nothing Stays Put, a gift to poetry fans is 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. Clampitt was a Berkshire resident at the time of her death.

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Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English, emeritus, at SMU in Dallas, where he taught from 1971 to 2016. He was also the longtime editor-in-chief of the Southwest Review (1984-2016). Spiegelman is the author of eleven books of literary criticism and personal essays,including If You See Something, Say Something: A Writer Looks at Art, a collection of pieces from the Wall Street Journal, where Spiegelman has written about books and the arts since 1987.

In 2003-04, he was the first Amy Clampitt Fellow in residence at the Clampitt cottage on Nielsen Lane in Stockbridge. There he assembled an edition of the poet’s letters (Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt), which Columbia University Press published in 2007. Nothing Stays Put is his first biography.

Reviews
“An insightful, exemplary literary biography . . . Spiegelman handles [Amy Clampitt’s] personal life delicately, and he offers perceptive readings of her work. Although he claims that ‘poems are the writer’s best biography,’ his discerning examination is outstanding.”

—Kirkus, starred

“Scintillating, warmly conversational, and richly elucidating . . . Spiegelman vividly chronicles this late-bloomer’s Quaker childhood in Iowa and nonconformist life in New York, where she worked in publishing and for the Audubon Society, traveling in Europe whenever possible, and gradually bringing to exalted fruition her profound ardor for language, literature, and nature; her spiritual quest and political activism, her omnivorous aesthetic of precision and serendipity.”

—Booklist, starred