Tom Clark History
Tom Clark is an American editor, poet and biographer who was born in 1941. He originates in the Near West Side of Chicago where he was born and also where he grew up. He went to the University of Michigan and he received his first award, the Hopwood award for poetry. In 1968 he got married to Angelica Heinegg in New York City and after 2009 he lived in California. Some of his latest books of poetry include names such as the ‘Light and Shade: New and Selected Poems’ and ‘Threnody’, both published in 2006.
The Tom Clark history as a poet began in 1963 when he started to work as a poetry editor for the Paris Review. He worked there for ten years and throughout his life he published various volumes of poetry with Black Sparrow Press. One of the most popular of these volumes was ‘Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats’. At the same time he has written literary essays and reviews which have been published in important papers such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement or the San Francisco Chronicle. But his work has also been published in several other journals. If one is interested, they can find a collection of Tom Clark’s essays on contemporary poetry in ‘The Poetry Beat: Reviewing the Eighties’. Tom Clark has also been a teacher in the 1987-2008 period during which he taught Poetics at the New College of California.
Tom Clark is still active in his work and he still produces poetry and fiction as well as nonfiction. In 1991 he published the biography of one of his mentors in poetry, Charles Olson. Moreover he is also the author of biographies of other important American writers including names such as Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, Edward Dorn and Robert Creely.