American poet, editor and biographer
Tom Clark (March 1, 1941 – August 18, 2018, aged 77) was an American poet, editor and biographer.
[1]
Education and personal life
Clark was born on the
Near West Side of
Chicago , and attended Fenwick High School in Oak Park. After high school, he attended the
University of Michigan , where he received a
Hopwood Award for poetry. He then won a
Fulbright Scholarship to undertake graduate study at
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in England (1963-5), before spending further time pursuing doctoral research (on the advice of
Donald Davie ) at the newly-established
University of Essex .
[2]
[3] It was while in Britain that Clark famously hitchhiked through
Somerset in the company of
Allen Ginsberg .
[3]
On March 22, 1968, he married Angelica Heinegg, at
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery , New York City.
[4] As of 2013, he was living in California.
Career
Clark was poetry editor of
The Paris Review from 1963 to 1973, and published numerous volumes of poetry with
Black Sparrow Press , including a verse biography: Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats (1994). His literary essays and reviews appeared in
The New York Times ,
The Times Literary Supplement ,
Los Angeles Times ,
San Francisco Chronicle ,
London Review of Books , and many other journals. Some of his essays on contemporary poetry were collected in The Poetry Beat: Reviewing the Eighties . From 1987 to 2008, he taught poetics at
New College of California .
[5] [
failed verification ]
Residing in California for the remainder of his life, Clark was an active writer, producing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. In 1991, he published a biography of
Charles Olson , one of his poetic mentors, titled Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (Norton: 1991).
Death
On the evening of Friday, August 17, 2018, Clark was walking across a street in
Berkeley, California , and was hit by a car at about 8:40 p.m. He died on the following day.
[6]
Bibliography
Poetry collections
Stones . Harper & Row. 1969.
Air . Harper & Row. 1970.
Green . Black Sparrow Press. March 26, 1971.
ISBN
978-0876850817 .
Smack . Black Sparrow Press. December 1972.
Blue .
Black Sparrow Press . August 1974.
ISBN
978-0876851838 .
Fan Poems . North Atlantic Books. 1976.
ISBN
978-0913028452 .
When Things Get Tough on Easy Street . Black Sparrow Press. 1978.
ISBN
978-0876853498 .
A Short Guide to the High Plains, For
Ed Dorn . Cadmus Editions. November 1980.
ISBN
978-0932274175 .
Paradise Resisted: Selected Poems 1978-1984 . Black Sparrow Press. May 1, 1984.
ISBN
978-0876856116 .
The Border: Poem and Drawings .
Coffee House Press . 1985.
ISBN
0918273064 .
Disordered Ideas . Black Sparrow Press. June 1, 1987.
ISBN
978-0876856956 .
Easter Sunday: Selected Poems 1962 and 1987 . Coffee House Press. October 1, 1987.
ISBN
978-0918273277 .
Fractured Karma . Black Sparrow Press. February 1990.
ISBN
978-0876857939 .
Sleepwalkers Fate: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1991 . Black Sparrow Press. June 1992.
ISBN
978-0876858707 .
Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of
John Keats . Black Sparrow Press. January 1, 1994.
ISBN
978-0876859186 .
Like Real People . Black Sparrow Press. October 1, 1995.
ISBN
978-0876859841 .
White Thought . Hard Press. 1997.
ISBN
978-8890972096 .
Empire of Skin . Black Sparrow Press. November 1997.
ISBN
978-1574230512 .
Light and Shade: New and Selected Poems .
Coffee House Press . April 1, 2006.
ISBN
978-1566891837 .
Threnody . effing press. 2006.
Trans/Versions . Libellum Books. January 1, 2010.
ISBN
978-0975299388 .
The New World . Libellum Books. January 1, 2010.
ISBN
978-0975299371 .
Feeling For The Ground .
BlazeVOX Books . February 11, 2010.
ISBN
978-1935402961 .
Something In The Air . Shearsman Books. March 15, 2010.
ISBN
978-1848611085 .
At The Fair . BlazeVOX Books. June 21, 2011.
ISBN
978-1609640446 .
Canyonesque . BlazeVOX Books. September 16, 2011.
ISBN
978-1609640712 .
Distance . BlazeVOX Books. April 6, 2012.
ISBN
978-1609640972 .
Truth Game . BlazeVOX Books. July 10, 2013.
ISBN
978-1609641443 .
Evening Train . BlazeVOX Books. July 11, 2014.
ISBN
978-1609641870 .
Ride . Flow Press. May 25, 2017.
ISBN
978-0998735719 .
Literary biography
Fiction
Essays on Poetry
Other books by Clark
References
^ Sandomir, Richard (August 24, 2018).
"Tom Clark, 77, Is Dead; Poet, Biographer, Baseball Bard" . The New York Times – via NYTimes.com.
^ 'Tom Clark', poets.org
[1] . Retrieved 6 January 2020.
^
a
b Tom Clark, 'Letters Home from Cambridge (1963-5)', Jacket Magazine , issue 20, December 2002.
[2] Retrieved 6 January 2020.
^ Biographical data on Clark taken from contributor's notes section at
The Holiday Album: Greeting Card Poems For All Occasions feature at
Jacket magazine , edited by
Elaine Equi , with a poem by Clark
^
Tom Clark Author Page at the Jacket Magazine website
^
"Pedestrian, 77, dies after driver struck him south of The Alameda crosswalk" . Berkeleyside . 2018-08-18. Retrieved 2018-08-18 .
External links
International National Artists People Other