I love poets’ letters. Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorites, by Amy Clampitt. It’s about the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters in New York, and celebrates the anonymous and collective nature of medieval art — art from a world where the “I” was less celebrated than it is today.

Someone once told me they think Clampitt’s letters get less interesting as she gets famous, if only because she gets busier, and maybe it’s true. . . I don’t have my own book collection here to find the exact quote, but what is it Edward Abbey says about writers’ letters? “But hell, I do like writing letters. Much easier than doing work.”

“On a sunny afternoon, as this one was, its location high on a bluff above the Hudson, facing the Palisades, is bathed in light, both direct and reflected. There are ramparts where you can walk in the open, and inside there are gardens where, just as I had hoped, some hothouse daffodils and crocuses and narcissus were already in bloom — the Cloisters proper. Or rather, not proper — a true cloister does not exist in any aggregate, but is simply an enclosed courtyard, quite generally, if not always, open at its center to the elements and attached to a church of a monastery — a place not for formal worship, but simply for walking and meditation. Rockefeller money has made a museum of various elements of a number of cloisters, most of them from different regions in France, and there are odd pieces of painting, sculpture, stained glass, metalwork, enamel, and so on, dating to the middle ages. These, and above all tapestries. The really glorious treasure is a roomful of these which have to do with the mythological hunt for the unicorn. I have always loved them — everybody does — but on that afternoon I felt that I had discovered them for the first time. Before then I had been inclined to regard tapestry, even so marvelous a specimen of it, as a minor art, a sort of inferior brand of painting. But on that afternoon, while I wandered in and out, visually speaking, among the little wild strawberries, the bluebells and daisies and periwinkles and dozens of other flowers (so faithfully rendered that nearly all have been botanically identified) which are woven into the background of each of the scenes of the hunt, for the very reason that it was a composite work rather than that of a single individual — and not only composite but anonymous; not only the weavers, but the designer and even the place of origin are unknown, and even for whom it was commissioned is a matter of conjecture — I found it more satisfactory than painting. . . . When it came time for the regular Sunday program of transcribed medieval music, I found myself a stone, instead of a chair, to sit on, and watched them file in. And after a while, when the first Kyrie started, I stopped watching the people and simply concentrated on listening to the music and watching the sunlight come in at a thirteenth-century window. The Kyrie, which of course is a cry for mercy, and the sun on the stone, a purely physical phenomenon, seemed while I listened to have some affinity, almost to be one and the same thing. After a while, when the music changed to something else, I was mildly aware that while this was going on I had — perhaps for no more than an instant, but there is no measuring this kind of experience — entirely forgotten my own existence. . . . Possibly this is what is supposed to take place at baptism — but if baptism it was, it wasn’t of water, but of light. By this time it was late afternoon, and with the reflection from the river so bright that you could barely look at it directly, the whole hilltop, the whole world was fairly brimming with radiance. I walked around for a while, looked at the people, and walked to the subway, rather tired, and yet rested too, and pleased with everything.”

I’m writing you from Lenox, Massachusetts, where I am in the last three weeks of being poet in residence in the Amy Clampitt House. I went for a walk down Old Stockbridge Road this morning. There’s snow here, but what a difference from the weather at home in Minnesota when I left, a little after New Year’s — the sidewalks were caked with ice and it was five below. I’m thinking, as usual, about Amy Clampitt.

I’ve been obsessed with Amy Clampitt the entire six months I’ve lived here, a side effect of the residency I didn’t expect. But it’s an intensely personal residency. I don’t just live in her house, as the poet-in-residence lives in Robert Frost’s farmhouse in Franconia, NH, I live among her things. The chairs and dresser and artwork were hers. There’s photographs of her on the walls, and there’s a K for Korn — her husband was Harold Korn, a Columbia law professor — on the sterling silverware. I’m allowed to leaf through her archived letters. Most of all, the house is full of her books. Hundreds of books. Books on all topics: poetry, of course, but also botany, and vegetarian cookbooks from the seventies, and field guides, travel guides, Greek theater, religion. There’s a book I keep leafing through without actually reading it. It was published in the sixties and is all about different ways to end a poem, called Poetic Closure. Lots and lots of slim volumes of poetry published in the 1980’s, by poets with impressive publications and blurbs that herald each as the next great poet of our age, poets I’ve never heard of. Books that seem to magically appear as I re-read Willard Spiegelman’s Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt: one day, I read a letter she wrote from Assisi, Italy, and it was only then that I noticed the guidebook to Assisi on the bookshelf in the dining room. Books that were actually read, by her, and are still full of penciled notes in her barely decipherable handwriting and the little slips of paper with which she kept her place.

It’s hard to believe that the collection of books in the house represents only half of the books she left behind. Her editor at Knopf, Ann Close, told me that they kept the books that seemed most appropriate for the residency. I am sad that I will leave without having read more than a few; back in August, I dreamed of reading all of them, but back in August, the days were long, and it felt as if I had a lifetime to spend here, writing and walking and reading.

I spend a lot of time wondering which of her books aren’t here.

Someone’s book collection is a version of their thumbprint, a visual map of their brain, and a writer’s book collection is especially fascinating. I always wonder how writers lead their private lives. After all, their published books of poems are art, separate from the poets. But the writers’ book collections, maybe, are where their selves and art meet, are some of the raw material that gets composted into their work.

Once, early in my residency, in a book about Greek theater, I found a note from a friend of Amy Clampitt’s. It was postmarked April, 1950. In the note, the friend thanks Amy for bringing a lobster-mushroom casserole to a recent potluck, and asks for the recipe. I have no idea whether Clampitt ever sent it to her, but I’m almost sure this is it. It’s from a book called Casserole Cookery: One Dish Meals for the Busy Gourmet, published in 1943. In the front of the book there’s a list of substitutions for rationed ingredients.

Is what goes on in the kitchen a poem? No. But I know an awful lot of poets who are great cooks, too.

Lobster and Mushooms (Time: 50 minutes)

Ingredients:
1 package frozen lobster
½ pound fresh mushrooms, sliced
¼ pound butter
3 tablespoons flour
½ cup white wine
½ cup light cream
2 eggs
salt and pepper
grated lemon peel

Melt butter, blend flour. Stir the cream in gradually; heat mushrooms in sauce; add wine (slowly), salt and pepper and lemon peel. Remove from the fire, cool slightly, and stir in the eggs. Add the lobster (slightly thawed). Turn into a low buttered casserole and bake in a medium oven (350) 30 minutes. Serves 4.