Thomas Willard Clark (March 1, 1941 – August 18, 2018) was an American poet, editor, and biographer.
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.'Tom Clark', poets.org . Retrieved 6 January 2020.Tom Clark, 'Letters Home from Cambridge (1963-5)', Jacket Magazine, issue 20, December 2002. Retrieved 6 January 2020. It was while in Britain that Clark famously hitchhiked through Somerset in the company of Allen Ginsberg.
On March 22, 1968, he married Angelica Heinegg, at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, New York City.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
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.Tom Clark Author Page at the Jacket Magazine website
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.
Bibliography Poetry collections
Literary biography
Fiction
Essays on Poetry
Other books by Clark
References
External links Finding aid to the Tom Clark papers at Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library The World Begins: A visit with Tom Clark Tom Clark Author Page at Jacket Magazine Tom Clark page at the Poetry Foundation Tom Clark's Blog Tom Clark page and poem at the Academy of American Poets Tom Clark, 1941-. American author Washington University Libraries bio "Knights of the Road" - Tom Clark reviews "This is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris" by James Campbell in the London Review of Books (Vol. 22 No. 13 · 6 Jul 2000)