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     When I think of Amy Clampitt’s poetry, I always hear sound first: sound as unwelcome disturbance and interruption but also as bidden movement, music and vibration. Although aware of accusations of cacophony, Clampitt often celebrated the discordances within language. “I kind of like all of these mouthfilling, bumpy sounds”, she once told an interviewer, almost as if poetry were like eating and speaking at the same time. The lack of decorum implied by such an activity is consistent with Clampitt’s view of the poet as a child who has “refused to grow up”. She plays with language as a child might play with a gobstopper in its mouth. The trajectory of a typical Clampitt stanza resembles the hurried consumption of a favourite fudge or toffee. She toys with the line and metre of the poem, juggling it from side to side. Dense, rich language is crammed into a tight, packed space, which only the poet’s shifting voice can unstick. Clampitt’s Collected Poems can almost be seen as an extended ‘Goblin Market’. There is the same irreverent delight in sound almost as if it were a forbidden treat.

     There are numerous instances of this trope in Clampitt’s writing. I think of Yeats advising poets to pack experience in salt and how Clampitt seems to store it in sugar, returning poetry to its pre-modern aural roots. She has a curious way of rolling words around the mouth, sifting out their various nuances and sensations as if language had a taste as well as a sound. ‘Gooseberry Fool’ is a good example of this with its tingling evocation both of the tang of sampling gooseberry and also of feeling like one, the awkwardness of “having turned thirteen” as Clampitt describes it:

The acerbity of all things green
and adolescent lingers in
it – the arrogant, shrinking,
prickling-in-every-direction thorn-
iness that loves no company except its,
or anyway that’s what it gets.

The experience of puberty and of sexual desire is recalled through the “acerbity” of the gooseberry’s taste and also the “acerbity” of the poem’s fidgety construction. Clampitt transforms sound into sense in an exuberant play on words.

     ‘Iola, Kansas’ has a similar transformative effect with its “Wonder Bread sandwiches” and “free refills” of coffee:

we’ve come to a rest stop, the name of the girl

on the watertower is Iola: no video, no vending machines,
but Wonder Bread sandwiches, a pie: “It’s boysenberry,
I just baked it today,” the woman behind the counter
believably says, the innards a purply glue, and I eat it

with something akin to reverence: free refills from
the Silex on the hot plate

The resonant “boysenberry” pie and its layered “innards” of “purply glue” are eaten “with something akin to reverence”. Iola seems more than just a Greyhound rest stop, a Kerouac-like marking post. There is something both homely and strange about its capitalised “Wonder Bread”, its unerringly believable woman and those surprisingly generous “free refills” of coffee. Iola sounds similar to Clampitt’s birthplace of Iowa. As Helen Vendler suggests, “the Iowa prairie of her childhood is the fixed point from which all moves are measured”. She seems to be literally and figuratively travelling there in the poem, towards “the mystery of the interior, to a community”. The sound of Iola, and perhaps even the tastes experienced there, are connected to memory and to home. The link between sound and recollection recalls Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’ with its similarly miraculous crumbs. Clampitt also views language as a physical ingredient to be marinated on the tongue, baked on the page to be spoken and heard.

     Her sense of the proximity of sound to poetry is everywhere in her writing, recurring as a theme in her criticism too. She calls T. S. Eliot “ventriloqual”, is fascinated by Marianne Moore’s “distinctive murmur” and wonders whether to compare Henry James to Mozart or Puccini. On a biographical note, it is fascinating to read of Clampitt interrogating younger poets on the relative merits of Heavy Metal music at a Florida residency. As Katherine Jackson recalls, while the other poets made dinner, “Amy took herself off to the sidelines and for the next twenty minutes or so, danced contentedly” (to The Grateful Dead as it happens!). Clampitt’s interest in all types of music can be related to her linguistic experimentation which tends to include shifts in register and tone, jarring uses of other languages and an at times clumsy appropriation of erudite terminology. Such eccentricities have often led to the sidelining of her poetry by readers more used to verbal economy and visual clarity. They have perhaps missed the point of her work. To enjoy Clampitt’s writing it is necessary to trespass the sound barriers she sets up, diving into the orchestrated twister of her thrilling multi-voiced poems.

     Music is not so much the backdrop to Clampitt’s art and life, as one of its guiding principles. As her friend Mary Jo Salter insists, she always “listened intently” for things, writing for the ear rather than the eye. It is not surprising then to find Hopkins “first” in Clampitt’s list of influences. Her description of his “wallowing in sound” seems also to suggest her own immersion in the art of making words fizz across the page. Clampitt may well be the loudest poet since Hopkins. She is certainly a writer who rewards hearing first, concurring with Basil Bunting’s belief that “poetry is written to be heard and not to be read in silence”.

     Clampitt is terrified of such silences. A Quaker by birth who later thought of becoming a nun, she spent much of her life listening out for sound, “for the still small voice, for that which is God in every man… [and] for something noisier, for the upheaval that would signal the Second Coming was at hand”. Clampitt’s ear seems somehow tuned to notice different frequencies of sound. Like Emily Dickinson, she captures the precise pitch of the world around her while she is waiting for the spiritual meaning to show through. There is a sense of reverence in her poetry for the music underpinning appearances, the sounds that go unnoticed underneath the natter and twitter Clampitt heard in everyday life.

     ‘Fog’ is a wonderful example of this musical sensibility. It gives depth and definition to an opaque seascape by gradually releasing sound outwards. The poem builds up a lyric millefeuille of music through a drip-drop process of tentative accumulation. The “mumble of ocean” in the first verse is akin to the string section quietly taking up a movement’s main motif. The sea-crystals “chimes” bring the percussion section in. As the last verse opens, “foghorns” awaken with the “campanula of bell buoys” before a final choir of “bird voices”:

                            Opacity
opens up rooms, a showcase
for the hueless moonflower
corolla, as Georgia
O’Keefe might have seen it,
of foghorns; the nodding
campanula of bell buoys;
the ticking, linear
filigree of bird voices.

A foggy Maine coastline is transformed into a complex orchestral piece as Clampitt carefully threads the various sounds together. There seems to be the motion of a fugue or sonata backing up the poem, as though the two forms were actually equivalent. “Opacity/ opens up rooms” is in a sense Clampitt’s motto. She pulls open the locks keeping the doors of perception shut not through descriptive force or polemic, but through the repetitive questioning of sound in the poem that grows from a single “murmur” into several “voices”. The “voices” of the poem are the listeners Clampitt picks up on the way who all seem to share her sense of the world as a natural hymn, perhaps without even realising it.

     Clampitt encourages us to listen to the world before observing it. She privileges Hopkins’s notion of instress over inscape, emphasising not so much the physicality of objects as the resonant sounds that bring them alive. Her aesthetic is particularly foregrounded in noticing the murmurs of discontent other more prominently polemical poets overlook. One of Clampitt’s favourite verbal tics is the preposition “under-”. In ‘The Cove’, the porcupine’s awkward progression “from under the spruce trees” allows us to glimpse at “the underbrush of normality”. In ‘The Sun Underfoot Among the Dews’, the poet suggests there is a kind of “understory” at work in the world to “unhand unbelieving”. And in ‘Bertie Goes Hunting’, we see into another “understory” via another “underbrush”, glossed for us as the “silver underside of memory”. Clampitt’s fondness for this preposition is a kind of signature note in her poetry. It implies a scepticism towards the “story” many of us accept and believe. This ideological distrust obviously has overt political implications. Clampitt had a frayed poster of Bob Dylan tacked to the wall of her New York apartment and she implicitly shares something of his protest spirit. An active campaigner against the Vietnam war, she did not think seriously about publishing poetry before then. ‘A Scaffold’ attacks Reagan America’s monopoly of wealth through the single demolition of a tenement building. The pulling apart of a community finds its verbal equivalent in the “lumbering chords” of Beethoven and the “autumnal thump” of Baudelaire. In ‘Sed de Correr”, the scattering of refugees is heard through the dispersal and fragmentation of language itself: “Who will hear?” what has happened can never be answered.

     However, Clampitt’s most evocative poems tend to be those that avoid such bald statement. The politics behind a poem like ‘Times Square Water Music’ are more successful for not straining so hard. Clampitt places the narrator in the middle of a subway, “abruptly way-/ laid” by the sound of dripping water. The errant “sneaking seepage” of water disrupts the smooth workings of the urban conveyor-belt because it fixes one person to the spot, clogging up the rest. The “musical/ minuscule/ waterfall” is nature’s equivalent of the poet’s own voice, the small lyric sound protesting against the rush and pull of modern living:

Think of it
undermining
the computer’s 
cheep, the time
clock’s hiccup,
the tectonic
inchings of it
toward some general crackup!
Think of it, think of 
water running, running
running till it
                   falls!

Sounds “running, running, running” away, words on the hop, exuberantly outperforming the computer’s cheap “cheep”. Clampitt watches the American dream “crackup”, turning away to consider nature’s continuation. The electronic “cheep” and the mechanical “hiccup” are undermined by the sound of water “ooz[ing]/ from the walls!” Whereas Hopkins would focus first on the water itself, Clampitt is more interested in  the sound of water which propels her outside the subway, across even the Atlantic, to the “moss/ and maiden-/ hair fernwork” of a Yorkshire moor. The “standing water” underneath Times Square remains fixed only for those who see it as such. For those who care to listen, it releases the echo of many other sounds and places.

     When asked what writers needed to know, Clampitt had an answer ready: “predecessors”. Her work welcomes the sounds of many poets inside it, almost as if her Collected Poems were a roomy guest house full of different voices: Keats and Hopkins are frequent visitors, Wordsworth and his sister make a considerable impression, Bishop drops in now and again for the weekend, Plath and Lorca and Vallejo and Woolf have all signed their names. Yet amongst all these other poets, it is sometimes difficult to hear Clampitt speaking. “Writers need company”, it is true. But I sometimes wish she had spent a little more time on her own. Clampitt is at her best, I think, when she lets her sorrowing, quizzical, slightly comic voice speak through: the voice who crams a poem with “mouthfilling, bumpy sounds”, almost as if she had never eaten before. That enjoyment of language – as if it were literally gooseberry fool on the tongue – is where her poetry tastes best.