The recipients of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius grants” will each receive $625,000 over five years, no strings attached. That made some of us wonder what past MacArthur fellows have done with their money, a question that led us to 1992 winner Amy Clampitt.
Clampitt, a poet, was on vacation when she heard from her friend, writer Karen Chase, that she had been named a MacArthur genius.
Amy Clampitt published her first full-length poetry collection, The Kingfisher, in 1983.“She was furious with me because she thought I was teasing her,” Chase recalls. “And by the end of the conversation she said, ‘I’m gonna buy a house in Lenox!’ ”
That’s Lenox, Mass., home of Edith Wharton, one of Clampitt’s favorite writers. Chase helped Clampitt find a small, clapboard house that became the 72-year-old poet’s first major purchase. The next year, Clampitt was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Chase reads from notes of conversations between Clampitt and her husband, Harold Korn:
“What’s going to happen to the house? I don’t want it broken up,” Clampitt said.
“It’s ours,” Hal replied. “It’s ours together, it always will be. I’ll keep it that way the rest of my life.”
After his wife’s death, and before his own in 2001, Korn dreamed up a fund to benefit poetry and the literary arts. Since 2003, the house Clampitt bought with her MacArthur money has been used to help rising poets by offering six- to 12-month tuition-free residencies.
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