Tom Clark was a king of minor poets, if we understand “minor” as having less to do with quality than a localized perspective that admits only a handful of themes. It’s okay he wasn’t Dante: a poet can still build a great deal on very little acreage. Much of his poetry appeared in little handbound magazines and pamphlets, ephemeral by design, with print runs of approximately fifty. Many of these are long lost, likely gathering dust in a shoebox in some old poet’s closet, probably somewhere in the Hudson Valley.
Tom’s poems are pretty great. Also great was the guy’s bullshit detector, as evinced by his gut-distrust of Language poetry. He was irked less by the movement's experimentalism than its self-seriousness, particularly the grandiose political claims of its chief “theoreticians”. In 1985, the height of scorched-earth level bitchiness in the poetry world, Tom published a takedown of Language luminary Barrett Watten in Poetry Flash, a magazine with a readership of maybe thirty people, max. It’s funny, catty, and a bit below the belt. But most importantly, it predicted the forced sterilization/institutionalization of American avant-garde writing, thanks to Language and other hypocrites. And he was right. (Bummer!) Tom Clark was killed by a car on a mid-August day in San Francisco.
-Garrett Phelps