Clausen, Andy 1943-

views updated

CLAUSEN, Andy 1943-

PERSONAL:

Born Andre Laloux, October 14, 1943, in Belgium; immigrated to the United States as a child; Education: Attended six colleges.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Seven Stories Press, 140 Watts St., New York, NY 10013.

CAREER:

Poet and educator. Naropa Institute, Boulder, CO, faculty member, 1980. Presently works as a stonemason, troubadour, and freelance teacher of creative writing for the New York City school system. Renegade, publisher.

WRITINGS:

Extreme Unction, 1974.

Austin, Texas, Austin, Texas, 1981.

Without Doubt, Zeitgeist Press (Berkeley, CA), 1991.

Trek to the Top of the World, Zeitgeist Press (Berkeley, CA), 1996.

Fortieth Century Man: Selected Verse, 1996-1966, Autonomedia (Brooklyn, NY), 1997.

(Editor, with Allen Ginsberg and Eliot Katz) Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, Seven Stories Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Also author of The Iron Curtain of Love.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Memoir of his relationships with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and other Beat Generation poets.

SIDELIGHTS:

Born in a bomb shelter in Belgium in the middle of World War II, Andy Clausen was raised in Oakland, California. In his early twenties he discovered the work of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso—leaders of the "Beat" poets—and decided to emulate their life and art. He has traveled extensively, reading his work throughout North America as well as in Prague, Amsterdam, and Kathmandu. He has described his own poetry as "sentence movies" and has persisted in the belief that poetry must be presented orally to be effective.

Clausen writes frequently about his friendships with Beat artists. He also writes poems that express his sometimes radical political beliefs. Indeed, in a comment quoted by the publisher of Clausen's collection Fortieth Century Man: Selected Poems, 1996-1966, Allen Ginsberg called Clausen "a vox populi of the democratic unconscious." With Eliot Katz, Clausen helped Ginsberg edit Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems. In 1977, Clausen founded and began editing the underground magazine Renegade.

A faculty member in 1980 at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he taught in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Clausen has taught creative writing and promoted poetry in public schools in New York, New Jersey, Colorado, and California. Currently he works as a stonemason, troubadour, and freelance creative writing teacher.