Reflecting on her poetic predecessors and contemporaries, Amy Clampitt reveals the many connections in their craft

Celebrates the twentieth anniversary of this important and influential book series

An evocative portrait of the beloved and acclaimed poet, whose late-in-life success took the literary world by storm. “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.” —The Washington Post 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.

This pioneering collection of new essays challenges established modes of reading American lyric poetry, by orientating interpretation so that it incorporates an awareness of the book context in which individual poems are embedded. These essays critically explore individual books by Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian and Jorie Graham, and consider the book as a restrictive, “binding” concept for Emily Dickinson and some contemporary American poets. Rebound both provides innovative readings of supposedly familiar poets and books, and also generates critical strategies for renewed engagement with American poetry traditions. As a “speaking whole” Rebound addresses a rich variety of topics: intentionality as hermeneutic; the architecture and artefacture of the book; gender identity and the book; the positioning of the book in postmodern poetics; the consequences of textual history for interpretation and reception; and the American poetry book as metonym for nation. Contributors: Domhnall Mitchell, Eldrid Herrington, Charles Altieri, Stephen Matterson, Stephen Wilson, Maria Irene Ramalho De Sousa Santos, Ron Callan, Michael Hinds, Gareth Reeves, Lucy Collins, Justin Quinn, Nerys Williams and Nick Selby. Charles Bernstein’s “The Book as Architecture” is reprinted as an Afterword.

Just as the look of the American landscape has changed since the nineteenth century, so has our idea of landscape. Here Bonnie Costello reads six twentieth-century American poets who have reflected and shaped this transformation and in the process renovated landscape by drawing new images from the natural world and creating new forms for imagining the earth and our relation to it.

A collection of poems commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the killing of four Kent State students on May 4, 1970.