Tom Clark Collection

The Tom Clark collection contains his six titles from BlazeVOX. This is a great set of electrifying work by one of America’s foremost poets.

At the Fair | Canyonesque | Feeling for the Ground
Truth Game | Evening Train | Distance

Truth Game

“Very exciting… The poems have the ‘now’ sound of current experience; they enable one to see a little further into life as it’s presently being lived.”

— John Ashbery

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Evening Train

In Evening Train we witness people on a bus, a window in the night, greenery, a bird on its perch—and then at the center of this world, something nameless seems to open. It’s hard to say just what happens, other than the words of each poem itself. But that isn’t quite right. It’s as if the words are a way for the poet to inscribe silence. You turn the page, wondering, and it arrives again—something quite beyond what is told. Tom Clark is a master.

—Aram Saroyan

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Distance

“You have kept your own mind and done your perceptive and singular work every day — on your own resources and with your own intent. For those who can care, you are a benchmark for what such industry and capability can realize. Your practical hand has been there for me, I know all the way…”
—Robert Creeley to Tom Clark, July 26, 2002

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Canyonesque

“The place he writes from, of void/non-void overlap, is a pure arena for the imagination to play in; and Clark is likewise pure: austere, bleak, exalted too… shimmering as ever.”
—Alice Notley

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At the Fair

I’ve known and read Tom Clark for almost half-a-century as a master of many genres: a writer of plays, biographies, novels; as an editor and critic — but always foremost, as a poet. At the Fair gives glimpses of this poet peering through the eyes of his reflection in the mirror of time and reporting on the memories of that image. Part autobiography of the author in shards; part philosophy of atmosphere and thought; part natural history of air, land and water; part defense of the local; part the literate writer at work, translating, being distracted by the logic and beauty of language: this book, which I read straight through, is a tribute to a lifelong addiction: a mutable one-handed keep-awake smack in the forest of loss. One’s hat is raised as observation passes.
—Tom Raworth

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Feeling for the Ground

Pretty much exactly like Tom Thumb’s Blues, Mr. Clark goes on as ever letting his sensibility seep like rain through all the great American vernacular sites — film noir, baseball, the shore, dreams — and the result is a sequence of utterances that feel both timeless and inexhaustibly resonant.
—Jonathan Lethem

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Tom Clark was born in Chicago in 1941 and educated at the University of Michigan, Cambridge University and the University of Essex. He has worked variously as an editor (The Paris Review), critic (Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle) and biographer (lives of Damon Runyon, Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn), has published novels (Who is Sylvia?, The Exile of Céline, The Spell), memoirs (Jim Carroll, Late Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan) and essays (The Poetry Beat, Problems of Thought: Paradoxical Essays). His many collections of poetry have included Stones, Air, At Malibu, John’s Heart, When Things Get Tough on Easy Street, Paradise Resisted, Disordered Ideas, Fractured Karma, Sleepwalker’s Fate, Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats, Like Real People, Empire of Skin, Light and Shade, The New World, Something in the Air, Feeling for the Ground, At the Fair, Canyonesque, Distance and Truth Game. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and partner of forty-six years, Angelica Heinegg.