 After high school, he attended the University of Michigan, where he received a Hopwood Award for poetry.He then won a Fulbright Scholarship to undertake graduate study at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in England (1963-5), before spending further time pursuing doctoral research (on the advice of Donald Davie) at the newly-established University of Essex.It was while in Britain that Clark famously hitchhiked through Somerset in the company of Allen Ginsberg.