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Amy Clampitt (1920 - 1994 )

Amy Clampitt

Amy Clampitt was born in New Providence, Iowa June 15,1920 and brought up on a 125-acre farm in New Providence, Iowa where apparently she felt she was a misfit as a girl living in a Quaker environment during the Depression.

She graduated with honours from Grinnell College in 1941, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City.

She started writing poetry in high school, but then focused her energies on writing fiction instead. To support herself, she worked as a secretary and writer at the Oxford University Press from 1943 to 1951, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society from 1952 to 1959, and a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. She was also an editor at E.P. Duttom from 1977 to 1982.

She was married to Harold Korn, a Colombia law professor.

She died of cancer at her home in Lenox, Massachusetts, September 10, 1994. She was survived by her husband, Harold Korn, as well as by two brothers and a sister.

Her work was self-published and appeared in a limited edition chapbook titled "Multitudes, Multitudes" (1974). Four years later (1978) her work appeared for the first time in the New Yorker. Her first full-length collection, "The Kingfisher", published in 1983, was followed in 1985 by "What the Light Was Like", in 1987 by "Archaic Figure", and in 1990 by "Westward". A Silence Opens, her last book, appeared in 1994.

Her entire collection of poetry ,"The Collected Poems Of Amy Clampitt " was published in 1997 .

Here are some links to her poems on the internet :

Many of her works dealt with life in Corea, Maine, a lobster community where she spent 20 summers. She had a lifelong love of birds and animals.

The recipient in 1982 of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1984 of an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, she was made a MacArthur Prize Fellow in 1992.

She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Writer in Residence at the College of William and Mary, Visiting Writer at Amherst College, and Grace Hazard Conkling Visiting Writer at Smith College.

Amy Clampitt

Amy Clampitt had this to say about the Authorized King James Version of the Bible:

"... the rhetoric of the King James Version has the aspect not of a stumbling block but rather of a bulwark..."

You can purchase her books online from Amazon.com by following this link

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