Andy Clausen, Pamela Twining, and A.D. Winans
Woodstock, NY poets Andy Clausen and Pamela Twining hit the road, venturing off on a “Beat Revival Tour,” destination: San Francisco. Joining them is San Francisco poet A.D. Winans.
Events at the Beat Museum are free of charge, made possible by Friends of the Beat Museum.
Andy Clausen
Andy Clausen was raised in Oakland California USA. He graduated from Bishop O’Dowd High School in 1961 and attended six colleges. After reading the poems of the characters in Kerouac’s books, he felt he’d found his life’s vocation and headlong began trying to be a Beat poet in 1965. He has traveled and read his poetry all over North America and the world. (New York, California, Alaska, Texas, Prague, Kathmandu, Amsterdam etc.) He has maintained a driven intrepid lifestyle and aspired to be a champion of the underdog. He has had many occupations studying humanity and earning a living. Clausen has written about his friendships with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Ray Bremser, Janine Pommy Vega, Peter Orlovsky, and many others of the Beat Generation.
He has lectured at universities, high schools, and art centers. Clausen has taught at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University. He was co-editor of, POEMS FOR THE NATION, with Allen Ginsberg and Eliot Katz (Seven Stories Press). He was an editor at LONG SHOT Magazine. Clausen wrote about Ray Bremser
and appears in Encyclopedia of Beat Literature (Kurt Hemmer, editor) Clausen has back packed around the world and has resided in over twenty states and provinces.
For twelve years AC conducted poetry workshops in the NY state prison system for Incision Arts. In 1999 Clausen began teaching poetry in the schools under the auspices of Teacher’s & Writers Collaborative. Andy now resides in Woodstock, NY, where he teaches, writes, and performs his work. He lived with Janine Pommy Vega the last 12 years of her life and celebrates The Annual Janine Pommy Vega Poetry Festival in Woodstock.
Pamela Twining
I was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the middle of the last century, to a melting pot American family with early settler roots, as well as a Native American connection that no one ever discussed. I was always a poet, my first efforts published only in elementary school journals, but my sonnet “Neveah”, written at 16, was honored with a scholarship to a six week poetry workshop in Washington DC. An early poem, “Rejoice! The Second Coming!” was performed at Regina High School in Hyattsville, MD, with orchestration and conducted by prominent Philippine composer, Rosendo E. Santos, professor of music at the Catholic University.
I left school to travel, raise children and live off-the-grid on an organic farm, always finding time to write, though I only started reading my work in public in 2010. During the 1990s, I attended Vassar College on a scholarship received from the Ford Foundation, using poetry as a voice for a Women’s Studies discipline. A long poem “The Rape of Humankind: a Conspiracy Theory”, after William Blake, was used as the subject of a Graduate thesis on Blake, at the request of the professor.
Most of the past years were spent “inhaling”, as it were. And in 2009, my children raised, my parents no longer in need of me, I began to read my work at Open Mics and was soon a Featured performer. My first chapbook, “i have been a river…” was published by Heyday Press in 2011, followed by “utopians & madmen”, DancinFool Press, in 2012 and “A Thousand Years of Wanting” by Shivastan Press in 2013. My work has also appeared in Big Scream #51 and Big Scream #52, Heyday Magazine, Vol 1, Issue 1 and Vol 1, Issue 3, and Napalm Health Spa 2013, the annual magazine of the Museum of American Poetics.
I have appeared with beat legends Andy Clausen and Antler, Jeff Poniewacz, Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, Anne Waldman, George Wallace, and others on stages in Detroit, Milwaukee, Boulder, Denver and Ward CO, and in New York City, as well as Albany and my home of over 40 years, Woodstock, NY.
I am currently working on a long piece, a memoir in poetic form. I am also one of the organizers of the Janine Pommy Vega Poetry Festival, held annually in Woodstock at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum.
A.D. Winans
A. D. Winans is a native San Francisco poet, writer and photographer. He is a graduate of San Francisco State University. He returned home from Panama in February 1958 to become part of the Beat and post-Beat era. He is the author of fifty books and chapbooks of poetry and prose. Major books include The Holy Grail: The Charles Bukowski Second Coming Revolution, North Beach Revisited, and This Land Is Not My Land, which won a 2006 PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. Most recent books include The Wrong Side Of Town, Marking Time, Pigeon Feathers, Billie Holiday Me and the Blues, No Rooom For Buddha, and Love – Zero. In 2007 Presa Press published a book of his Selected Poems: The Other Side Of Broadway: Selected Poems 1995-2005. In late 2010, BOS Press published a 300-plus page of his Selected Poems.