Releasing the Moment in Clampitt’s Poem Fog Essay -- Clampitt Fog Essa

The photographer sights, clicks, stops; the moment is captured; the vision settles. The poet sights, clicks, begins; the moment is released; the vision starts. Tess Gallagher says, "the poem is always the enemy of the photograph." The art of poetry demands more than external vision; a poem takes the reader outside and inside to see, hear, touch, and feel every detail. In Amy Clampitt’s poem "Fog," she immerses the reader’s senses in the entirety of the moment’s external grace and its secret inner core. Clampitt seeks out what is hidden to the eye. She wants what the camera cannot record. Her subject allows her to show off poetry’s distinct function and strength. Fog obscures, shrouds, limits, dissolves; it defeats sight. "Fog" reveals, illuminates, widens, and intensifies; it gives sight. There is a pleasing poetic irony in Clampitt’s ability to render so present to the mind’s eye precisely what the eyes themselves cannot see at all. "A vagueness comes over everything, / as though proving color and contour / alike dispensable" (Clampitt 610). As things disappear, "the lighthou...