White Thought, is a book of elegiac lyric reflections with an autobiographical grounding. In the late 1960's, Tom Clark emerged as one of the brightest voices of his generation. In the thirty years since, in his criticism in the San Francisco Chronicle and in book after book of poetry and prose, he has registered his responses to the cultural life of our times. Now, in the tradition of the poetic notions of Stephan Mallarmè, out of mid-life confrontations with mortality and illness, Clark has produced a cycle of poetic meditations on death and mourning occasioned in part by the death of his mother, Expressed as brilliant, lyrical rhapsodies, these poems are raised as a bulwark against despair and exist as a heroic reminder that poetry can give answers to abiding questions of meaning.

Critical Praise for Tom Clark

"A writer known and loved for his enthusiasm, curiosity, purity and scope of imagination and an amazing ability to blend humor and cosmic concepts."

"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. The trappings are as shimmering as ever."

"Clark's exactitudes of diction generate and inform the imagination… finally it is only poetry that is capapble of saving such extensive cultural memoryfrom the vortex of history."

The Tom Clark Story

Tom Clark was born in Chicago in 1941. He received a B.A. from the University of Michigan and and M. A. from Cambridge University where he was a Fulbright scholar. He has received grants for writing from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. For ten years in the sixties and seventies he served as poetry editor of The Paris Review, of which he remains and advisory editor. He is a painter and teacher of writing, on the Core Faculty in Poetics at New College of California

Other Books by Tom Clark

His books include many volumes of poetry from Air (1969) and Stones (1970) to three volumes of selected poems from Black Sparrow, When Things Get Tough On Easy Street (1978), Paradise Resisted (1984), and Disordered Ideas (1987). He has written biographies of Damon Runyon, Jack Kerouac and Ted Berrigan. His most recent book is a novel, The Exile of Celine (Random House).

Tom Clark lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and daughter.