TOM CLARK: CAUGHT UNDER THE RUBBLE OF NEW COLLEGE

Dale Smith posted an appeal for donations on behalf of poet and biographer Tom Clark now recovering from a recent stroke and buried under the rubble of California's New College with no salary, pension or healthcare insurance. New College caved in after the federal Department of Education refused to release $3 million in aid and the college's accreditation was pulled. Faculty that worked there for years were, with little notice, left without salaries, pensions or benefits of any kind.

Aside from his own impressive poetic production, Clark produced exhaustively researched biographies of Charles Olson, Ed Dorn and Jack Kerouac. With the possible exception of Kerouac, these are the texts we continue to refer to today for information on these figures.

Read more about Tom Clark and New College at Possum Ego — and donate what you can.

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Idly skimming through Tom Raworth's Collected Poems I stumbled upon "For Tom Clark." Two lines of the poem particularly appropriate to the current New College situation:

death of imagination
protected by 'government'