{"id":76929,"date":"2014-09-17T19:26:31","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T23:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=76929"},"modified":"2014-10-14T13:05:31","modified_gmt":"2014-10-14T17:05:31","slug":"macarthur-fellows-past-and-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/17\/macarthur-fellows-past-and-present\/","title":{"rendered":"MacArthur Fellows, Past and Present"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Congratulations to the MacArthur Foundation\u2019s twenty-one new fellows<\/a>, including the graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel, whom the Daily <\/em>was fortunate to interview back in 2012<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Most people are oppressed in some way or other by their family\u2019s expectations, by their parents\u2019 psychological issues, by any number of things. And it holds us back, it limits who we can be in the world. We\u2019re so consumed with our personal problems that we\u2019re not doing more important things. I mean, who am I to talk? All I do is sit in my basement making notes about my therapy sessions. But I want us all to be autonomous and think for ourselves and do the things we\u2019re good at, and I think that\u2019s much more the exception than the rule for people. Not to mention living in a democracy that\u2019s functional. I mean, if we were all really doing those things, what would our world look like?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This latest round of \u201cgenius\u201d grants\u2014always with those pesky tone quotes!\u2014inspired NPR to look back at the work of Amy Clampitt<\/a>, whose poems the Review<\/em> occasionally published before her death in 1994. Clampitt, a 1992 MacArthur fellow, used her grant money to buy a home in Lenox, Massachusetts, \u201ca small, clapboard house that became the seventy-two-year-old poet’s first major purchase.\u201d Soon after, Clampitt was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and her husband Harold Korn<\/p>\n

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dreamed up a fund<\/a> 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 twelve-month tuition-free residencies \u2026<\/p>\n

This December, the nineteenth resident of the house Amy Clampitt purchased with her MacArthur purse will settle in, get to work and likely draw on some of the same things that inspired Clampitt. Among them is a small box on the mantel filled with the late poet’s beach glass collection.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Clampitt was interviewed for our Art of Poetry series<\/a> in the Spring 1993 issue, where she elaborated on another collection of sorts:<\/p>\n

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My own original handwritten drafts are usually on the backs of those silly announcements law firms send out, that so-and-so has just been appointed a partner, which would otherwise go into the wastebasket, and which my best friend Hal, a law professor, saves for me. They\u2019re printed on fine creamy vellum, and they\u2019re very small\u2014four-by-six inches or so, though maddeningly there isn\u2019t even a standard size. I\u2019ve put away stacks of these things for a single poem.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Below is an abbreviated list of Paris Review<\/em> contributors who have been awarded grants over the twenty-three years of the Fellows program:<\/p>\n