The NYT Remembers Tom Clark

The New York Times has published an obituary for poet Tom Clark, who died on August 18 at the age of 77. "His wife, Angelica, said he died in a hospital a day after he was struck by a car while crossing a street three blocks from their house in Berkeley," writes Richard Sandomir. More:

One night, in 1965, Mr. Clark met Mr. Ginsberg, the prominent Beat poet, in a pub in Bristol, England, where Mr. Ginsberg had given a reading. The two hitchhiked to Somerset and Glastonbury, rode a bus to Bath and then resumed hitchhiking to London.

Two weeks later, Mr. Clark interviewed Mr. Ginsberg for The Paris Review. In the introduction, Mr. Clark described their journey to London. “We were unsuccessful,” he wrote, “until Ginsberg tried using Buddhist hand signals instead of thumbing; half a minute later, a car stopped.”

Mr. Clark worked for the magazine at first from England — where, after earning the equivalent of a master’s at Cambridge, he studied and taught at the University of Essex — and then from Manhattan, where he himself became part of that second wave of New York School poets.

While there he married Angelica Heinegg at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village, the longtime home of the Poetry Project.

After they settled in Berkeley, he taught poetics for New College of California from 1987 to 2008, holding classes in his house; she was his copy editor and occasional collaborator.

Erik Noonan, a poet and former student, recalled the lectures in Mr. Clark’s bare dining room, with the class sitting on mismatched wooden chairs.

“He was very high-minded, very fast-thinking,” Mr. Noonan said in a telephone interview. “It was hard to keep up with him, with his light-speed intellect and leaps of association. One time, the singer Robert Palmer had died, and Tom stopped in mid-lecture and did a capsule history of his career, out of nowhere, with biographical details and criticism.”