Good learning — vital learning — can happen anywhere at any time. You don’t need a classroom or the motivation of a grade or a job to learn about literature and poetry. A good thing to remember, even as I get ready to head off in pursuit of yet another degree.
Several years ago, through mutual friends in the poetic grapevine, I was invited to take part in a summer workshop at Tom Clark‘s house in Berkeley. For a nominal fee, a few poets met in his living room to exchange work and talk. Mostly we wound up talking about baseball, movies, or popular culture. This, I came to learn, was partly Tom’s style — his unique ability to mesh and meld strands of information from disparate sources into a synthesis of the whole — partly, I think, he was uncomfortable with the standard workshop format. At any rate, when he offered me the chance to audit his regular seminars for New College, I jumped at it. My description of the three semesters I spent studying with Tom can be read here.
I will only add that, even at that late date, when the writing on the wall of New College’s impending demise was clearly legible even to me and the other “auditors,” those classes were deep and rigorous and challenging in all the ways one might have hoped for. Tom never took a moment off, though his health and the school were on rocky footing. Sure enough, this past year, the school finally collapsed. The news report — linked from Dale Smith‘s own blog on Tom and New College — is a fascinating and sickening read. The bottom line is that Tom and his wife Angelica, already beset with health problems, now have no income, and are in need of help.
There will be a benefit reading / auction at 12th St. Books in Austin on Saturday, April 26 at 7pm — or donations can be sent to
Tom Clark
c/o Dale Smith
2925 Higgins Street
Austin, Texas 78722
Hope to see you there.
