BERKELEY — Prominent poet, author and biographer Tom Clark was struck and killed by a passing vehicle while crossing The Alameda late Friday night.
Clark was hit just before 9 p.m. as he crossed The Alameda just south of Marin Ave. The driver remained at the scene, according to the county coroner’s office. Clarke was taken to a local hospital and at 12:56 a.m. on Saturday, he died.
Clark, 77, was an accomplished poet, publishing dozens of collections of his work over a 46-year period. He was best known for his biographies of poets Jack Kerouac, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, to name a few, but also dabbled in sports writing — publishing a history of the Oakland A’s in 1976.
Between 1963 and 1973, Clark was the poetry editor for “The Paris Review” after prodding from his former teacher, poet Donald Hall, according to the Poetry Foundation. Before all of that, Clark hitchhiked around England with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and mingled with poets such as Robert Graves and Gregory Corso.
Upon hearing of Clark’s death on Saturday, the Allen Ginsberg Project, which manages the estate of the late poet, wrote that Clark was “a singularly adept, seemingly effortless, absolutely exemplary, lyric poet.” The site highlighted Clark’s blog, “Beyond The Pale” as an “amalgam of rigorously selected photography and poetry — and prose.”
Clark’s last entry in his blog, entitled “the dance of conquest is going to have to wait“, was published before 7 p.m. Friday night. In it, Clark selected past photos of Guatemalan refugees, the Dance of Conquest, and ended with a photo of nine Guatemalan children who were reunited with their parents at the Texas border Aug. 8, 2018.
With permission from John Tranter, Australian poet and publisher of Jacket Magazine, here is a selected passage from Clark’s Statement on Poetics:
One starts from a feeling or something seen or a word. A sound occurs, like a rustling sound heard at evening through a forest. Is it the murmuring of the wind in the trees or the distant rushing of a stream? The dream of a world in which things would be different, antagonisms would be dissolved, suffering and domination would disappear, and there would be no more authority to which to report, takes place in that sound, is immanent there, while everything external to it dies away. In this moment what is human, language itself, seems to become natural creation again.
Read Clark’s blog at tomclarkblog.blogspot.com