Clark, Tom
CLARK, Tom
Nationality: American. Born: Thomas Willard Clark, Chicago, Illinois, 1 March 1941. Education: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Hopwood prize, 1963), B.A. 1963; Cambridge University (Fulbright fellow, 1963–65), 1963–65; University of Essex, Wivenhoe, 1965–67. Family: Married Angelica Heinegg in 1968; one daughter. Career: Poetry editor, Paris Review, 1963–73; instructor in American poetry, University of Essex, 1966–67; senior writer, Boulder Monthly, Colorado. Since 1987 instructor in poetics, New College of California. Awards: Bess Hokin prize, 1966, and George Dillon memorial prize, 1968 (Poetry, Chicago); Poets Foundation award, 1967; Rockefeller fellowship, 1968; Guggenheim fellowship, 1970; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1985. Address: c/o Black Sparrow Press, 24 Tenth Street, Santa Rosa, California 95401, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
Airplanes. Brightlingsea, Essex, Once Press, 1966.
The Sand Burg. London, Ferry Press, 1966.
Bun, with Ron Padgett. New York, Angel Hair, 1968.
Chicago, with Lewis Warsh. New York, Angel Hair, 1969.
Stones. New York, Harper, 1969.
Air. New York, Harper, 1970.
Green. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1971.
The No Book. Wivenhoe Park, Essex, Ant's Forefoot, 1971.
Back in Boston Again, with Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett. Philadelphia, Telegraph, 1972.
John's Heart. London, Cape Goliard Press, and New York, Grossman, 1972.
Smack. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1972.
Blue. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1974.
Suite. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1974.
At Malibu. New York, Kulchur, 1975.
Baseball. Berkeley, California, Figures, 1976.
Fan Poems. Plainfield, Vermont, North Atlantic, 1976.
An Arthur Flegenheimer Sachet. Privately printed, 1977.
35. Berkeley, California, Poltroon Press, 1977.
How I Broke In/Six Modern Masters. Bolinas, California, Tombouctou, 1978.
When Things Get Tough on Easy Street: Selected Poems 1963–1978 Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1978.
Heartbreak Hotel. West Branch, Iowa, Toothpaste Press, 1981.
Journey to the Ulterior. Santa Barbara, California, Am Here/Immediate, 1981.
Nine Songs. Isla Vista, California, Turkey Press, 1981.
The Rodent Who Came to Dinner. Santa Barbara, California, Am Here/Immediate, 1981.
A Short Guide to the High Plains. Santa Barbara, California, Cadmus, 1981.
Under the Fortune Palms. Isla Vista, California, Turkey Press, 1982.
Dark As Day. Bolinas, California, Smithereens Press, 1983.
After Dante. Santa Barbara, California, Handmade, 1984.
How It Goes. Santa Barbara, California, Handmade, 1984.
Paradise Resisted: Selected Poems 1978–1984. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1984.
Property. Los Angeles, Illuminati, 1984.
Technology. Santa Barbara, California, Handmade, 1984.
The Border. Minneapolis, Coffee House Press, 1985.
Disordered Ideas. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1987.
Easter Sunday. Minneapolis, Coffee House Press, 1987.
Fractured Karma. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1990.
Sleepwalker's Fate. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1992.
Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1994.
Like Real People. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1995.
Empire of Skin. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1997.
White Thought. West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Hard Press/The Figures, 1997.
Play
The Emperor of the Animals. London, Goliard Press, 1967.
Novels
The Master. Markesan, Wisconsin, Pentagram, 1979.
Who Is Sylvia? Eugene, Oregon, Blue Wind Press, 1979.
The Spell: A Romance. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 2000.
Short Stories
The Last Gas Station and Other Stories. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1980.
Other
Neil Young. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1971.
Champagne and Baloney: The Rise and Fall of Finley's A's. New York, Harper, 1976.
No Big Deal, with Mark Fidrych. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1977.
A Conversation with Hitler. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1978.
The World of Damon Runyon. New York, Harper, 1978.
The Mutabilitie of the Englishe Lyrick (parodies). Berkeley, California, E Typographeo Poltroniano, 1978.
One Last Round for the Shuffler: A Blacklisted Ball Player's Story. St. Paul, Minnesota, Truck, 1979.
The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. Santa Barbara, California, Cadmus, 1980.
Jack Kerouac. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1984.
Late Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan. Bolinas, California, Tombouchtou, 1985.
Kerouac's Last Word: Jack Kerouac in Escapade. Sudbury, Massachusetts, Water Row Press, 1986.
The Exile of Céline. New York, Random House, 1986.
Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life. New York, Norton, 1991.
Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place. New York, New Directions, 1993.
Things Happen for a Reason: The True Story of an Itinerant Life in Baseball, with Terry Leach. Berkeley, California, Frog Ltd., 2000.
*Manuscript Collection: University of Connecticut, Storrs; University of Kansas, Lawrence; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Critical Studies: "Tom Clark: Inertia and the Highway Patrol" by Pat Nolan, in Sun & Moon (College Park, Maryland), 5, 1979; interview with Tom Clark by Lynn Gray, in FM Five (San Francisco), 3(3), winter 1986; "Tom Clark: A Checklist" by Timothy Murray, in Credences (Buffalo, New York), 1(1), n.d.
* * *Tom Clark's poetry published in the 1960s can give the impression of the man who got on his horse and rode off in all directions at once. The look of the poems is frequently reassuring, the lines of more or less equivalent length grouped into equivalent units on the page, promising a rational structure. But within these units chaos sometimes reigns. The thin or nonexistent punctuation often creates syntactical confusion. There is also a certain fondness for quirky modifiers, as though the poet were a computer choosing at random from a bank of nouns and a bank of adjectives and combining the results. To place a "secretive tambourine" and a "sober dog" back-to-back in the poem "Comanche," from Stones, suggests an interest more in the way words can collide than in their potentiality for pleasing combinations or for meaning. This fondness for playing with words surfaces in some poems in the form of jingly sound effects. In addition, Clark seems fond of the chain poem, in which the repetition of a single word or phrase in each section ties the whole together, as in his brash parody of Wallace Stevens's famous blackbird poem, "Eleven Ways of Looking at a Shit Bird" (Stones).
The poems published during the 1970s move away from these scattergun effects. This work seems clearer and cleaner, although it has the same drive and energy, the general feeling being that Clark is perpetually en route. In addition, the range of subjects is wider, with the introspection of the earlier work giving way to a concern with things and people in the world. One of my favorites is "To Kissinger" (When Things Get Tough on Easy Street), a wacky series of insults that make a forceful political point with humor. In the same collection are a number of poems about running, some short, throwaway pieces, others, such as "Morning Leaves Me Speechless," expressing beautifully the euphoria that can appear on the other side of physical exertion.
In a number of books published during this time Clark seems overly fond of the tiny poem. Green and Blue contain a number of poems that consist of one sentence or even less; Smack is made up entirely of single sentences arranged vertically on the page. These efforts at minimal art via the word are not always successful; they give the impression of notebook jottings, casual ideas that might grow into poems. There is a throwaway streak in Clark's work, a willingness to let things go, to gallop on to the next poem, to get on down the road. While this tendency may undermine the shorter poems, in the longer ones, where there is room for discursive, casual, or colloquial effects, it can produce exciting poetry. A good example of this is "Chicago" (When Things Get Tough on Easy Street), an extended recollection of the poet's youthful experiences as an usher at various stadiums, ballparks, and convention halls in the Chicago area that ends by evoking an entire era—that strange period of American history known as "the fifties." There is an interesting and unexpected idea implied in the poem, that poets and ushers have something in common. Both are employed spectators, in it for more than entertainment.
Clark is a world-class spectator, his work a grand record of his passionate looking on. In many of his sports poems, especially those dealing with baseball, he tries to invest the game with a meaning far beyond its position in American society as entertainment. Clark is a fan; he does not write about baseball but celebrates it. The poems belong to the tradition of the encomium, and the names of the players ring through them like a Homeric roll call: Orestes Minoso, Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Bert Campaneris, Bill Lee. The poem on Lee is perhaps the best of these, a long, warm appreciation of the player's eccentric intelligence.
Clark ultimately seems to have been released from his focus on baseball as a subject, perhaps because he has been able to celebrate the sport in prose in a number of books and articles, although his fondness for the encomium persists in some of his poems about artists in other fields—two on Reverdy and one each on Ungaretti, Vuillard, Kafka, and Lenny Bruce. But his midcareer work is not all hero worship. For example, in "How I Broke In," the poem sequence that concludes When Things Get Tough on Easy Street, Clark shuffles and reshuffles a number of images, allusions, and individual lines, upping the ante in each section and increasing the pressure until one begins to wonder how he can sustain it and keep going. To read this sequence is to confront something powerful, even dangerous, something barely held in control.
Clark's combination of a West Coast, postbeat identity with a slightly harder, more scholarly edge has been characteristic of much of his career. In Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats, Clark turns directly toward poetic tradition and by doing so takes spectatorship to a new level. In this collection of 127 poems and prose pieces, Clark attempts both to mimic Keats as well as to redraw him into something of a Clarkian modernist-romantic. Thus, heightened swoons such as "She comes, she comes again, sighing like a ringdove/in the pallid moonshine, or tongueless Philomel/who cannot utter her ravisher's name/because he has stolen away her articulation" are conflated with raw, aggressive lines such as "His endless suspicions and moods, as though everything/He had were about to be taken from him. And it was." It is interesting that in the prose sections Clark offers astute conjectures about Keats's life. Clark is impressive in his mastery of a range of poetic voices. The last section, "Coda: Echo and Variation," an extended, twelve-part deathbed song, is a Keatsian retrospection of a brief, tragic life and the most passionate and sad part of the collection.
Clark both resists and subscribes to the formal aspects of poetry. In Like Real People, a largely autobiographical collection of poems, the first section, "Happy Talk," consists of fourteen-line poems that clearly nod to the sonnet form, but not beyond their line count and rough line length. They read almost like an early Pollack painting, as surfaces crowded with small spots of various color. Although they are somewhat disjointed in their thinking, as a section they create atmospheric human yearning or nostalgia for childhood. The childhood poems, in a section called "Torn from an Old Album," are largely written in concrete, precise imagery. It is often the poems in "Reflections," written in longer, more prosaic lines, that are the most convincing pieces of the collection. Mixing prose into his books with characteristic flourish, Clark closes out this collection with the prose section "Confessions," in which he recalls his midcentury childhood and adolescence, his schooling in England, and his political and poetic life in the company of Ted Berringan and others.
—Steven Young and
Martha Sutro