Sandra Beasley writes a lovely essay about her recent visit to the Jentel Residency, and in defense of artist colonies and long walks and creative navel gazing overall.

How afraid we are of losing time! As if we can’t afford to write poems that won’t endure. As if the road can’t include both blackboard-jockeying and troweling cement. As if a few years spent on workshops, post-workshop pubbing, and rubbing elbows with professors you pray might blurb you—and I, too, went into debt for my MFA—wouldn’t have been spent in some other way equal parts tectonic and navel-gazing. Backpacking in Europe. The fixer-upper house. A rock band. An MBA.

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.