Hall wrote in A<\/em> Carnival of Losses: <\/em>“Tom Clark was the best student I ever had. As a senior at the University of Michigan he wrote a 44-page paper about the structure of Ezra Pound’s Cantos<\/em>, replete with Chinese characters — Tom’s back hurt from carrying Chinese dictionaries — and Greek, neatly ball-pointed . . . His paper went further into Pound’s structure of improvisation than anyone else had done.”<\/p>\n Tom Clark (L) and Lewis Warsh on the beach at Bolinas, Calif., 1968. Photo by Anne Waldman<\/p><\/div>\n Clark was at Michigan seven years before me. I bought his first poetry book, Stones<\/em>, shortly after it came out in 1969. I hitchhiked to Bolinas, but Clark wasn\u2019t there. (I met Lewis Warsh instead, another poet.) I had a poem in The World<\/em>, an East Village mag, and was thrilled. I wrote some more poems.<\/p>\n Clark kept up with poetry. Clark had a wise-acre, yet lyrical, poetic style that reminded me how I would write poetry if I was good, brilliant, and had stuck with it. I went over to prose (for the fame and money).<\/p>\n Clark<\/strong><\/span> wrote<\/span><\/strong> prose, too \u2013 mostly dry bios. I liked just one: The Great Naropa Poetry Wars<\/em>, an investigation on Allen Ginsberg\u2019s weird relationship with a Buddhist leader, Chogyam Trungpa, in Boulder.<\/p>\n I wanted to be Tom Clark for a while.<\/p>\n On Friday Clark was hit by a car and died. He was walking across the street in Berkeley. He was 77. It was an accident. A screw up.<\/p>\n![\"Tom](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/tomclark-lewiswarsh-on-the-beach-in-bolinas-298x300.jpg\")
![\"brush](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/brush-greaser-179x300.jpg\")
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