Poet, Biographer, Baseball Bard Tom Clark, RIP

Tom Clark, a prolific and empathetic lyric poet who hitchhiked across England with Allen Ginsberg, wrote a biography of Jack Kerouac, served as the poetry editor of The Paris Review and wrote verse about baseball, died on Aug. 18 in Oakland, Calif. He was 77.

His wife, Angelica, said he died in a hospital a day after he was struck by a car while crossing a street three blocks from their house in Berkeley.

Mr. Clark — whose influences included Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens — gracefully wed lyricism to modernism, added humor, cosmology and a love of the natural world, and demonstrated in his use of language a grounding in the poetry of British masters like John Donne and Andrew Marvell.

“His poetry was music to the ear — poetic, but not obtrusive like Dylan Thomas going ‘clang, clang, clang,’ ” Ron Padgett, a poet and friend of Mr. Clark’s, said in a telephone interview. “It was something subtler. You always came away elevated.”

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