Tom Clark, who "combined diverse roles of poet, biographer, novelist, dramatist, reviewer, and sportswriter during his writing career," died August 18. He was 77. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that Clark "was a prolific writer, the author of poetry books, novels, plays, theater reviews and sports journalism. He wrote biographies of baseball players and poems about the national pastime, which he became passionate about as a young boy when he attended Chicago White Sox games with his father."
His many books include Light and Shade: New and Selected Poems; Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place: Together With the Poet's Own "Autobiography"; Jack Kerouac: A Biography; Sleepwalkers Fate: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1991; Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet's Life; and Champagne and Baloney: The Rise and Fall of Finley's A's.
Clark was a former poetry editor of the Paris Review, contributor to Poetry magazine, a former instructor at New College of California and a dedicated blogger. He posted his final "Beyond the Pale entry a few hours before he died.
"It's such a tragedy," said Brandon Loberg, a director at the Beat Museum in North Beach. "He was one of the last of a group of elder statesmen of letters in California. That generation is pretty much passing into the sunset. Now we're without his unique voice." He called Clark's biography of Kerouac the "most accurate, informative and concise" among many.
Best American Poetry shared Clark's poem "The Edge of the Forest":
Poems ought to have memories.
They should remember other poems.
At this moment the noisy city
has fallen quiet, and the edge
of the forest is abuzz with voices,
the voices of poems beneath the old trees
talking quietly about the poems that were
once here but are not here any longer,
remembering each other.