Without Doubt. Andy Clausen (1991)

This lively book of poetry was published just a few
years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and amid the
rapid changes that were taking place within the
former Soviet Union. As a poet who had been
deeply influenced by the U.S. democratic tradition of Walt Whitman and
allen ginsberg as
well as the Russian futurist poetry of Vladimir
Mayakovsky, Clausen’s poems from this era were
perfectly situated to offer a new and healthy internationalist vision to greet the end of the cold war.
In opposition to the cynical “we won” attitude exhibited by most mainstream U.S. commentators at
the time,
Without Doubt expressed sound criticisms
of the militaristic and exploitation-filled betrayals
of both East and West during the previous decades
and offered an imaginative literary recipe for moreenlightened social possibilities. The book is also
filled with moving poems about personal dreams,
desires, and loss.
The original poetic voice of
Without Doubt
leaves quite a lasting impression. In Clausen’s
poems, empirical perceptions mix inventively with
jazzed-up surreal and modernist imagery. Tragedy is
juxtaposed with well-placed humor. Lyrical modes
mingle easily with narrative, epic, and oratorical
ones. Carrying on the most exciting, politically
progressive, and intellectually probing aspects of
the Beat tradition, strings of high-speed adjectives
mix with considered speculations about the unfair
nature of our socioeconomic landscape.
The book includes an introduction by Ginsberg that is replete with well-deserved superlatives:
“The frank friendly extravagance of his metaphor
& word-connection gives Andy Clausen’s poetry
a reading interest rare in poetry of any generation.” Ginsberg adds: “Would he were, I’d take my
chance on a President Clausen!”

Without Doubt is one of the most consistently
vital poetry books of its era. Just about every piece
in the volume is a compelling, surprise-filled jewel.
A six-page narrative poem, “The Bear,” which is influenced by visionary poems like Mayakovsky’s “An
Extraordinary Adventure which Befell Vladimir
Mayakovsky in a Summer Cottage” and Ginsberg’s
“The Lion for Real,” is told from the point of view of
a female speaker who throughout the poem is being
chased by a half-fantasized, half-real bear. The chase
gives the poet time to ponder questions about politics and the imagination. But when the bear inevitably catches up to the narrator, she summons “all
my power” and hits the bear in the mouth, whereupon the bear turns into a man who tells the narrator with a certain amount of sincerity: “All I wanted
to do was kiss you.” But the narrator sees through
the curtained contradictions, and a somewhat surreal tale includes the real antichauvinist message:
“‘You didn’t want to kiss me / You wanted to own
me / to dominate.” When the bear-man disappears,
the “blood & teeth remained,” and “Word raced
through the community / ‘Mayakovsky is Dead.’”
Utilizing a Mayakovskian style, Clausen carries on
the Russian poet’s radical tradition and extends its
political vision by metaphorically—in a surprising
twist of an ending—killing Mayakovsky himself.
“The Challenge” presents a moment of deep
despair (“up & down the abandoned boiling /
coastal waters of my desecrated torso”) by lamenting how far the poet is from more optimistic historical moments, including the earliest days of the
Russian revolution when it seemed, before Stalinism took hold, that a more progressive era might
well be dawning in that country:
I will live & die never knowing
The Baroque Golden Age,
The Age of Enlightenment,
Aquarius, Ha!
Let alone the night of the
Pink Lantern
The Stall of Pegasus
& Stray Dog Cafe
There’s no 1917 for me.
And yet, most of the poems, in spite of the
often-gloomy times, provide at least a potential
glimpse of hope, either in the substance of the
text or in the way that the poems’ surrealist elements convey, in the beautifully descriptive phrase
of philosopher Ernst Bloch, “anticipatory illuminations”—hints or sketches of social possibilities that
do not yet exist in the actual world. In “Patriotism,”
the second poem in the book (predating the fall of
the Soviet Union), Clausen redefines love of one’s
country and peoples by predicting that “Russia &
America / will pass in the night,” implying that the
end of repressive policies on both sides of the cold
war would open space for more democratic and
egalitarian political arrangements. In “The Iron
Curtain of Love,” Clausen expressionistically transforms symbols of cold-war militarism into pacifist
imagery: “there’s a warhead strapped to the back /
of the dove / It’s the iron curtain of love.” In the latter poem, he also paraphrases a Russian proverb to
assert that, even in dire moments, “every wall has a
door.” Or, as the main character in “Old Man” puts
it: “All in All, it’s a rough life. One not only has to
surrender, one has to keep fighting after that.”
Many of the poems in
Without Doubt focus on
various aspects of late 20th-century American life.
Clausen writes with lyrical power about homelessness in “Sacred Relics”: “red nosed busted blue
derelicts / supported by lampposts & buildings / in
the typewriter rain.” These homeless are surviving,
“gambling pain on the miracle / that’s never happened yet.” At the poem’s end, Clausen ominously
tells world leaders that a time will come when they
will need these homeless folks’ experience.
Clausen’s poems explore the spectrum of
human emotion. Love is ever-present (“Come
Love, bite my brain with resplendent teeth”) and,
in true Mayakovskian tradition, so is heartrending
lost-love (“It’s an ancient and miserable wail / for
the might have beens / this song of desire for one”).
While “This table is supporting me / better than a
lot of you ever did” (from “This Table”), Clausen
ultimately retains faith in the potential of human
action, empathy, and creativity, for he knows that
“Our Mission is the Future” and that “this paranoia, this body hatred / this genocidal pleasure /
this doctrine of might / cannot endure our wailing”
(from “Wail Bar Night”).
After the fall of the Soviet Union, many U.S.
activists sensibly advocated for a “peace divi
dend,” urging our government to take advantage
of this historic opportunity by finally scaling back
America’s exorbitant military budget and prioritizing long-neglected social needs such as affordable
housing, health care, education, and the environment. It was not to be. Instead, subsequent administrations continued to support the bloated military
budgets and procorporate economic policies that
had largely held sway throughout the cold-war era.
After the atrocity of September 11, 2001, George
W. Bush was able, by cynically manipulating legitimate American fears, to accelerate those regressive
social priorities under the guise of a loosely defined
“war on terror,” a war that has included an unwarranted and disastrous military conflict in Iraq that
continues to rage as I write this piece. We are living in an age in which there is still far too much
poverty and violence, far too many unaccountable
political and economic institutions, and far too
many fundamentalist groupings within too many of
the world’s religions. The final poem in Clausen’s
Without Doubt, with its cautiously upbeat title “We
Could,” speaks poignantly to our current times:
We wouldst rid the epic of slavery
for women and all others
We’d smash the caste system
We’d put aristocrats to work!
sacrificing this puny life
for the Infinite Future
We’d give Shiva something else to do. . . .
We are sentenced
there is no back to return to
We lick the Jewel in the Lotus
till it is human
then
We eat God alive!
Here is an imaginative tonic to the planet’s dominant, rigid ideas about economic systems, the role
of women, and the place of spirituality and creativity in daily life. Fundamentalism is challenged here
not by metaphorically killing off the notion of an
omnipotent, external god—or not by that alone—
but by then taking the concept of a living, enlightened spirit and placing it inside us—not simply
inside the “I” of the poet, but inside the “we” of us
all. Clausen’s book points the way toward poetry’s
emancipatory potential if only our overly dogmatic
ideas and policies could be left behind on the antique cold-war trail.
Without Doubt was published by Zeitgeist Press,
an independent press that was run by the fine poet
Bruce Isaacson, who used to host a popular reading
series with Clausen in San Francisco’s Cafe Babar.
As is the case with too many of the important books
by writers in the Beat tradition who ought to be
more well known than they are,
Without Doubt is
currently out of print. Hopefully, that will be remedied soon, and this book will more thoroughly find
its way to the “Futurians” to whom the book’s opening poem is aptly addressed.
Bibliography
Ginsberg, Allen. “Introduction to Without Doubt, by
Andy Clausen.” In
Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays
1952–1995,
edited by Bill Morgan, 431–433. New
York: HarperCollins, 2000.
Katz, Eliot. “The Bear for Real.”
Poetry Flash 225 (December 1991): 1, 8–9.
Eliot Katz

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