Clausen recalled: Katz and Cope pay respects

Post-Beat great dead at 80

Andy Clausen, one of the most-revered of that generation of poets who followed in the wake of the Beats, died this week aged 80. Two of his close friends – Eliot Katz, via an extended testimony, and David Cope, through his own poetic voice – pay tribute to the man and to the writer.

TRIBUTE I: ‘The best living poet in America’ by ELIOT KATZ

A GREAT AMERICAN poet and a great friend for 44 years, Andy Clausen, passed away peacefully in his sleep in a Kingston, NY nursing home and physical rehab center, Golden Hill, in the early morning of April 11th, 2024. He had spent the last few months in Golden Hill, trying to recover from a leg amputation (after a serious infection) and a variety of other physical ailments.

Because I have a post-surgery neck that made it difficult to take the long drive up to Kingston from where I live in New Jersey, I had kept in touch with Andy by phone. (And let me here thank Danny Shot and Raymond Foye, who did more to help Andy at Golden Hill these recent months than anyone except perhaps some of the nurses there.)

The last time that I talked with Andy on the phone was about 5 or 6 days before his death. During our call, he said that he was in so much pain, despite some pain meds, that he was thinking of trying to find an easy way out of this world. I made him laugh by asking him to please try to hold on for at least a little longer, to see if his pains might improve in the weeks and months ahead, and because I enjoyed still being able to tell people that I thought Andy Clausen was the best living poet in America. I’m not sure who I would say that about now, but at least he is now out of his pain and suffering.

Andy Clausen was born as Andre Laloux in a Belgium bomb shelter in 1943, and moved to Oakland, California at age three, at the end of the Second World War, when his mother gave him his new name – his last name, Clausen being the name of his new father.

Andy was physically stronger than most poets. After graduating from high school, he became a talented Golden Gloves boxer and, for a brief time, joined the Marines, which he left in 1966 after watching Allen Ginsberg on TV read his anti-Vietnam War poem ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’.  The line from Allen's poem that caught Andy’s attention and changed the direction of his life was the simple but poignant, humanizing question: ‘Has anyone looked in the eyes of the dead?’

With his ex-wife, Linda Clausen, Andy has two adult sons – Cassidy and Jesse – and a daughter Mona. Beginning in the late 1990s, Andy lived in a cabin on the outskirts of Woodstock, NY, with the well-known Beat poet, Janine Pommy Vega, until Janine passed away in early 2011 of a heart attack, compounded by a long battle with rheumatoid arthritis.

Sadly, Andy’s next long-term partner, the poet Pamela Twining, also passed away unexpectedly in July 2023, after what was supposed to have been a routine hospital surgery. In recent years, both Andy and Pamela had been named Beat Poet Laureates by the National Beat Poetry Foundation; and that Foundation’s publishing arm recently published a wonderful book, Two Hearts Beat, which included poems by both Andy and Pamela. Andy also published a terrific poetry book of his own in 2024, The Fabled Damned (Zeitgeist Press), which included an introduction by Danny Shot. 

It was a real pleasure to know Andy Clausen and to have had many adventures together through four-plus decades. The first time that I saw Andy read poetry, days after we had been introduced by Allen Ginsberg, was in the summer of 1980, at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where I was doing a monthlong apprenticeship with Allen.

Andy was scheduled to read one night as part of a three-person program, along with Allen and Phil Whalen, and Allen and Phil had Andy close the show, symbolically passing along a generational poetry torch. With his deep oratorical voice (check out any of his readings on YouTube), and poetry filled with amazing energy, insight, humor, and imagination, Andy gave a reading that night that left a deep and lasting impression.

A few years later, Danny Shot and I published a book of Andy’s, The Iron Curtain of Love, that included those first poems of Andy’s that I had heard. The poem that I remember most from that evening was his long poem, ‘From the Top of My Lungs: An Open Letter to the Russian People’, with its explorations of the historic hypocrisies and exploitations, sometimes hawkish and fatal, of both the US and Soviet governments, and its visionary insistence that artists and working people of the US and USSR could one day figure out how to put an end to the physically and psychically damaging Cold War: ‘No more guilt American O Russian / The Freedom to choose Peace—/ Jesus! How badly our governments behave! / Brothers & Sisters / THE GENERAL STRIKE! / NOW!’ 

Andy and I did many readings together through the decades – in Boulder, San Francisco, New Brunswick, New York City, Woodstock. A few of those readings featured Allen Ginsberg as the main headliner. One memorable early event was a young poets midnight reading – featuring Andy, Danny Shot, and I – at the large and historic Jack Kerouac Festival at Naropa Institute in 1982.

To get to that reading, Danny and I had taken a cross-country, energetized conversation-filled van ride with Andy and his family, a ride that also included the Beat jazz poet Ray Bremser, who seemingly chose beer as a substitute for any solid food during the full two-day drive, leading to many extra rest stops along the highway.

Andy and I were also roommates for about seven or eight months in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in around 1983, during which we started a feature/open reading series at the Roxy Bar, a series that included some well-known visiting poets, like Gregory Corso, reading with local NJ poets, and that continued on for about seven or eight years with a few different New Brunswick poets taking over running the series.

For decades, Allen Ginsberg consistently cited Andy Clausen as one of the most important poets of the next generation. For Andy’s book, Without Doubt (1991), Allen wrote an introduction that declared: ‘The frank friendly extravagance of his metaphor & word-connection gives Andy Clausen's poetry a reading interest rare in poetry of any generation.’ Allen also said in that same introduction that he would take a chance on a President Clausen!

Andy Clausen’s best work through the years extended the democratic-left and imagination-filled traditions of poets like Walt Whitman, William Blake, Muriel Rukeyser, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, the French surrealists, and the Russian Futurists, especially Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was always one of Andy’s favorites.

His many poetry books include The Iron Curtain of Love, 40th Century Man, Songs of Bo Baba, Without Doubt, and Home of the Blues (for which I wrote an introduction), and he was also the author of an extraordinary memoir, Beat, about his adventures with well-known and lesser-known Beat Generation writers.

At the request of Allen’s longtime secretary, Bob Rosenthal, Andy and I worked together as assistant editors to finish Poems for the Nation (Seven Stories Press, 2000), a small collection of political poems that Allen had started compiling and editing during the 18 months before Allen’s death in 1997. Andy also worked several years with Danny Shot and Nancy Mercado as a co-editor for Long Shot literary magazine.

In Andy’s poetry, empirical observations mix inventively with jazzed-up surreal and modernist imagery, the kind of surreal imagery that the European philosopher, Ernst Bloch, called ‘anticipatory illuminations’, because the surreal images don’t yet exist in the actual world and therefore imply the possibility of creating a better and more humane world in the future.

From wars to widespread hunger and poverty, from AIDS and Covid epidemics to ever-present racism and sexism, from continued violations of international human rights to the new and growing risk of climate change, our species has witnessed plenty of tragedy and danger over the last half-century. As he writes in ‘The War to Begin All Wars’, up to this point in world history, ‘the medicine isn’t working’.

Carrying on the most energetic, mindful, politically progressive, and intellectually probing aspects of the Beat tradition, strings of high-speed adjectives mix in Andy’s work with thoughtful speculations about unfair aspects of our often-broken social and economic landscapes and about the often-unjust nature of wage-based work.

Andy worked most of his adult life as a construction worker, a union hod-carrier, carrying around 80-pound sacks of cement, also holding other physically demanding jobs that included driving cabs, heavy stonework, and working in a saw mill. For some years, he taught poetry in New York schools and prisons, while still doing heavy-lifting jobs that, in a more just society, one of America’s best poets wouldn’t have had to keep doing late in life with a bad back.

Having titled one of his two books of selected poems, Home of the Blues, Andy Clausen earned the blues that he wrote about, the blues that have traditionally been sung with a sense of irony and self-awareness while waiting, writing, and working for a changed world.

Having reached the age of 80 with thousands of pages of poetry in published books and in hand-written notebooks, Andy Clausen during his lifetime earned a distinctive place among the second generation of Beat poets, in a way that Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen had foreseen when I first saw Andy read at Naropa in 1980.

Because Andy outlived most of the original Beat Generation poets, readers interested in the Beat poetry tradition, and in contemporary poetry in general, will find his perceptions about recent history and about our 21st century politics and culture to be essential reading.

In some segments of literary America, readers and listeners already know what Allen Ginsberg knew, that Andy Clausen was one of the most compelling poets of our time. The linguistic energy, surprise phrasings, and global insight of his poems send readers into motion – thinking, planning, pacing, going quickly down to the nearest poetry cafe, rock and roll club, or political rallies for peace, social justice, and ecological well-being. Our current, perilous world could surely use more people stirred by poets and other artists into constructive thought and action. 

Eliot Katz biography: Called ‘another classic New Jersey bard’ by the late Allen Ginsberg, Katz is the author of seven books of poetry, including Love, War, Fire, Wind and Unlocking the Exits, as well as a prose book, The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg. His most recent poetry book was a free pdf volume posted on his website before the 2020 presidential election, entitled: President Predator: Poems to Help Make America Trump-Free Again. A book of selected and new poems is currently being translated into Italian for an upcoming publication in Florence.

TRIBUTE II: ‘One of a kind, a giant…a titan’ by DAVID COPE

MY POET BROTHER Andy Clausen is gone, passed peacefully in his sleep last night. Andy was one of a kind, a giant, in life a spirit as large and capacious as they come, filling a room with his great spirit, and even after loss of the love of his life Pamela Twining and the removal of his leg at the knee, publishing two books, then passing quietly. I'll miss him, hoping if there is a spirit world that he'll meet up with Allen and Gregory and, of course, Pamela, in that realm.

We first met each other when Allen put us together to read at the Boulder bandshell in 1980, and we read together with Antler at my first book's launch in NYC 1983. Andy was a regular contributor during the 47 years of my Big Scream mag, and we read together on occasion – at his reading series in Boulder 1986, at a bookstore in Detroit and in Jersey City at the Fox and Crow in this century.

He was a titan with the most incredibly deep voice and lines that in reading sounded more like jazz lines than anyone I ever met. He once told his son Cassidy not to mourn him when he passes – organize!

‘Birthday Dreams for Andy’ by DC

Andy, I look over your volumes in my sunny bedroom—

finest visionary poet of our time, true successor to the Beats,

wild basso profundo with fierce command of rhythm & sound

over years and decades, aware too of your strength as a man—

my first taste of your work Shoe Be Do Be Ee-Op,

its derelict women poets to come, the times not changing,

sea sick man on sidewalk asking for the star, Festival of Squares

tribute to the great workingman poet Jack Micheline,

visionary Bo Baba Put Yourself in this Body and then

We’ll See How You Handle It Vacana, earlier birth of Ramona,

The Night Kerouac Died, Home of the Blues, Gokyo Lake

Breaking Up in the Sun, Shivaratri Time in Old Hardwar—

chronicling latter days of the Beat Generation, the years

from the Boulder Bandshell, NYC with Antler, driving

cross-country post-back surgery to Detroit, in Jersey City

barely able to stand yet delivering a powerhouse reading at

the Fox and Crow, all thankful you could join us. I think too

of your long search for love, finding it in the visionary romance

with Pamela. now, your struggle with foot and leg—always

the toughest of us, the best of us—may you rise above

this loss too, sing & shout true again—from Belgium, Oakland,

the many places touched by your presence, always a poet warrior,

deep well of inner strength, hod carrier poet, blues shouter,

great heart & powerful voice for the survival of love.

David Cope biography: Taught Shakespeare, Drama, Creative Writing, Multicultural Literature, Women’s Studies, etc. at Grand Rapids Community College for 22 years. Seven books and two chapbooks published, winner of award in literature from American Academy/Institute of Arts and Letters, 1988. Editor and publisher, Big Scream magazine, 1974-2021. In 2021, Cope published The Correspondence of David Cope and Allen Ginsberg (1976-1996) with Giant Steps Press.

See also: ‘Beat Soundtrack #19: Andy Clausen’, June 10th, 2022