10 Questions for Jan Clausen
HE IS A MAN of stories, and of music.
He would scoff to hear me say he has an artistic bent; his verdict on himself is that he lacks imagination. In other matters, too, he has the habit of self-effacement. And yet he’s bold, on the verge of overbearing, when marshaling evidence. He says he doesn’t get poetry—but I, having watched how avidly he attends to Blind Willie Johnson’s 1928 recording of “If I Had My Way,” caught up in its perfect balance of feeling and technique, can’t possibly agree.
—from Jan Clausen’s “Carriacou Man,” Vol 66 issue 3 (Fall 2025)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
As a very young person, I wrote a lot of “stuff” (poetry, journals), but the first piece I published and still like was a prose poem called “i am not a field goal kicker,” the body of which is a series of more or less surreal descriptions of the self. I was in my early twenties and still living in my birth state of Oregon when I sent it to Hanging Loose. In those days, you mailed off an envelope containing your typed work and often got a personal response—even when work was rejected! On this occasion, I received a brief acceptance note conveying the editors’ appreciation for the form of my piece, which in their eyes made it more successful than the rest of my submission. That was a huge event for me. I remain grateful to Hanging Loose—which is still going strong, by the way.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
What a question to ask of a 75-year-old writer! There are the rhythmic works that have soaked into my subsoil: Mother Goose and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses; Bob Dylan’s snarling lyricism; Yeats’s gorgeous music that has been with me since I took a college class called “Yeats and Eliot.” (Eliot faded fast.) Many lines from the King James Bible, though I’m not a believer. As an adolescent, I was wild about Dostoevsky, and later became attracted to a range of Russian writers, both novelists and poets. Repeatedly teaching Leslie Marmon Silko (the novel Ceremony especially) and David Wojnarowicz (Close to the Knives) imprinted me with their themes, structures, and imagery.
The lesbian and feminist writing community of the 1970s, which I plunged into shortly after moving to New York in 1973, was my real poetry school. Writers like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Cherríe Moraga, Judy Grahn, Gloria Anzaldúa, Susan Sherman, Irena Klepfisz, and Joan Larkin—some of them personal friends or writing mates, others vivid exemplars—profoundly affected my sense of what is possible and required. They showed me the necessity of breaking down the separation walls that bourgeois American culture has built to segregate art from political life (and, not incidentally, to police genre boundaries). They taught me the power of taking risks in writing, and also that writing by itself, no matter how brave, isn’t enough to change the world. I can’t say how, or if, these influences might be detected in what I write today—that’s for others to judge.
What other professions have you worked in?
“Professions.” Topless dancer for two nights before I flunked out. File clerk. Night baker of donuts. Nurse’s aide in a V.A. hospital. Tape transcriber in the days when that called for lightning-fast typists wearing headphones. Typesetter at a local newspaper in the pre-desktop era. Secretary. Teacher of writing (creative, expository) as well as “reading for writers” courses to college and graduate students.
What did you want to be when you were young?
I don’t remember wanting to “be.” I wanted to know. In my childhood, most adult women of my acquaintance were mothers; a handful were teachers or librarians. Those seemed to be the choices and they didn’t attract me. As I got older, I sometimes said I wanted to be a writer, but with no idea of what that could mean. I did know that I wanted to read everything, to grasp everything. I wanted consciousness. It’s still what I want.
What inspired you to write this piece?
“Carriacou Man” is a chapter of My Great Acceleration, my recently completed memoir of bicoastal existence in a world-killing era. A major theme is personal/familial entanglement with the crimes of American empire (and western “civilization” more generally). I was afraid to include any reflection on my marriage, for reasons I discuss in the piece, yet I finally understood that it would be cowardly, even dishonest, to give in to that fear. Like all my work, this book is not only a critique but a salute to reality—the reality of things, people, environments, and worlds that I deeply love. “Carriacou Man” is a crucial part of that.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
The “self-possessed terrain” of the coastal Pacific Northwest, where I grew up, is still vividly alive in me. The human ecology and built environment of New York City (specifically, Brooklyn) has been a terrific engine for my imagination since I moved here in the mid-1970s. As I explore in my memoir, it’s my background awareness of the relationship between these allegedly “opposite” places that has often fueled my work, even when I didn’t know it.
Jan (in the jean jacket, fourth from right) in Prospect Park with comrades from Park Slope Food Coop Members for Palestine (PSFC4Palestine). The group was taking part in the UNRWA 5K fundraiser on October 12th—a benefit for children’s mental health services in Gaza.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
Walking is my ritual, although I don’t think of it that way, but rather as an activity necessary to my daily life—both my physical life and my mental life. A recent poem contains the line “In a good week, words talk to me” and walking—mostly through streets and parks in central Brooklyn—encourages them to do so. The rhythm helps, as does the chance to observe the shifts and changes of my familiar surroundings. I ruminate spontaneously, not meaning to. I note which ideas rise to the surface and keep coming back, which sonic effects I’m inspired to repeat.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
Photography. Black and white. With a camera and film. Before 1960. The imprint (or trace) of the real, framing and cropping, juxtaposition, the staged interplay of intention and chance—these fascinate me in photographic works, and also in written texts.
What are you working on currently?
I’m writing a series of poems (perhaps it’s actually one long poem) consisting of 19-line lyrics in a syllabic form I invented. After reading about a certain yoga breath practice (breathe in for four, hold for seven, breathe out for eight), I started playing around with combinations of lines containing four, seven, or eight syllables and discovered that I now had permission to make what are in effect collages from intriguing combinations of words, sounds, and images. The lines could sing, or rhyme, or not. They could spring from observation or pure imagination. They could nod at storytelling, but didn’t have to. There’s scope for in-the-moment observation and wild speculation. The whole thing has been a happy surprise—I always used to view counting syllables as a pointless, rather annoying activity.
What are you reading right now?
In an effort to break my fun but unhealthy habit of reading four or five books at once, I’m currently confining myself to just one: The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk. It’s a fascinating take on a couple of my central preoccupations: the need for storytelling methods that acknowledge collective protagonists and the drama that results when desperate people are driven to remake the world. (Spoiler alert: “A terrible beauty is born.”)
Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, JAN CLAUSEN writes and organizes in the borough of Brooklyn, her home for the last 50 years. Her poetry titles include Duration (Hanging Loose Press), If You Like Difficulty (Harbor Mountain Press), and Veiled Spill: A Sequence (GenPop Books). A founding editor of Conditions magazine and veteran of the feminist small press movement, she has also published several volumes of fiction. Seven Stories Press recently reissued her 1999 memoir Apples and Oranges. “Carriacou Man” is a chapter from her manuscript in progress, My Great Acceleration.
