Tom Clark

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. It was while in Britain that Clark famously hitchhiked through Somerset in the company of Allen Ginsberg.

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.

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.