CLEMENS STARCK was born in Rochester, New York, in 1937. After dropping out of Princeton, he continued his education on the road, riding freight trains and working at a variety of jobs around the country. He has been a ranch hand in eastern Oregon, a newspaper reporter on Wall Street, a door-to-door salesman, and a merchant seaman.

For over twenty years he worked construction up and down the West Coast, as a union carpenter and carpenter foreman on projects from bridge work in San Francisco and Oregon to custom homes in British Columbia.

As a poet he received a scholarship from the Breadloaf Writers Conference as well as a grant and year-long residence at the Helene V. Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In 1998 he was the Witter Bynner Fellow and poet-in-residence at Willamette University, where he taught on several other occasions. In February 2004 he was visiting poet at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

His poems appeared in numerous magazines over the years, and in anthologies ranging from Walter Lowenfels’ Where Is Vietnam? (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1966) to a compilation of writing about work, A Richer Harvest: the Literature of Work in the Pacific Northwest (OSU Press, 1999). A number of his poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio and included in Keillor’s anthology, Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking / Penguin, 2005).

Over the years he read to diverse audiences throughout the West. A collection of his work, Journeyman’s Wages, was published by Story Line Press in 1995. The book received the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and was also the recipient of the 1996 Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

Studying Russian on Company Time, an account in verse and prose of his involvement with Russia and the Russian language, appeared in 1999 from Silverfish Review Press and was a finalist for the 1999 Oregon Book Award. (The book was reissued in a second edition in 2016.) Another full-length collection of poems, China Basin, was published in 2002 by Story Line Press, and was also an Oregon Book Award finalist. Two letterpress chapbooks of his poems have been published by Wood Works in Seattle: Traveling Incognito (2004) and Rembrandt, Chainsaw (2011). Old Dogs, New Tricks was published in 2016 by Oblio Press. In 2018, Empty Bowl published Starck’s collected poems, Cathedrals & Parking Lots. The Madrona Project: A Festschrift for Clemens Starck was released by Empty Bowl in November 2020.

In addition, Starck produced two audio CDs of himself reading his poems against a musical background:  Looking for Parts (2008) and Getting It Straight (2013).

As a family man, he and his wife raised three children. He lived for many years on forty-some acres in the foothills of the Coast Range, outside Dallas, Oregon. He died of mesothelioma on March 21, 2024.

For more information, see clemstarck.com.

Listen to a podcast about Clem featuring Joseph Bednarik, Clem’s longtime friend and one of his literary executors.