A lifelong resident of Ithaca, New York, Tom Clausen was born there on August 1, 1951, and graduated in 1973 from Cornell University. He presently works in the university library and plays outfield for the library’s ball club, called the Stacks Rats, in a recreational softball league. He throws and bats right-handed. Clausen is a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. He picked them as his team almost randomly at the start of the 1967 season. His choice was based, he says, “on the team’s name, and on its location.” Being between the North and South and between East and West and right on the “Big Muddy,” it seemed a perfect location for a team that would represent for him America’s pastime: “The Cardinals won the World Series that year and I became a lifelong fan. My favorite players at the time were Lou Brock and Bob Gibson.”
He first learned of haiku in the early 1980s when a friend gave him one of the four volumes of R. H. Blyth’s Haiku. He didn’t seriously take it up though until 1988 after he read an article in an Ithaca newspaper about Ruth Yarrow, a haiku poet then living in the area. His first haiku was “published in Modern Haiku in 1988 or 1989 and was written in Ithaca after viewing ducks on a winter day on Cayuga Lake.”
He is part of a small haiku group, which also includes John Stevenson, called the Route 9 Haiku Group. It meets several times a year in a Chinese restaurant in Halfmoon, New York, and publishes an annual chapbook of haiku titled Upstate Dim Sum. His latest book, being there, was recently published by Swamp Press.
in the shoe box
attic light from one window
and the creased Willie Mays
from the train window
fans outside the ballpark
before the game
back to back walks…
the catcher takes the pitcher
to the top of the mound
bottom of the 8th
eight determined drunks
get the wave going…
full moon just rising
we recount the best plays
on the drive home