Distance

“One of the reasons why language is so sick right now and cliché-ridden and lame and boring and laid-out, and about to go to sleep, is because there aren't a thousand Tom Clarks. If I were writing a prescription right now, you know, if I had my shiny thing here, a stethoscope around my neck, that's the prescription I'd write. Take one thousand Tom Clarks before going to bed.”—Edward Dorn, in Ed Dorn Lectures, Interviews, and Outtakes, 2007“You have kept your own mind and done your perceptive and singular work every day — on your own resources and with your own intent. For those who can care, you are a benchmark for what such industry and capability can realize. Your practical hand has been there for me, I know all the way...”—Robert Creeley to Tom Clark, July 26, 2002Tom Clark was born in Chicago in 1941 and educated at the University of Michigan, Cambridge University and the University of Essex. He has worked variously as an editor (The Paris Review), critic (Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle) and biographer (lives of Damon Runyon, Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn), has published novels (Who is Sylvia?, The Exile of Céline, The Spell), memoirs (Jim Carroll, Late A Memoir of Ted Berrigan) and essays (The Poetry Beat, Problems of Paradoxical Essays). His many collections of poetry have included Stones, Air, At Malibu, John's Heart, When Things Get Tough on Easy Street, Paradise Resisted, Disordered Ideas, Fractured Karma, Sleepwalker's Fate, Junkets on a Sad Scenes from the Life of John Keats, Like Real People, Empire of Skin, Light and Shade, The New World, Something in the Air, Feeling for the Ground, At the Fair and Canyonesque. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and partner of forty-four years, Angelica Heinegg.