Clemens P. Starck ’59

Born and raised in Rochester, N.Y., Clem attended two years at Princeton, rooming his first year with Bill Volckhausen, whom he had met in the summer of 1954 as a fellow exchange student in West Germany. The following year Clem left Princeton and began life riding freights, hitchhiking, and working diverse jobs: welder and laborer, ranch hand, newspaper reporter, railroad hand, vibrating furniture salesman. He shipped on as a merchant seaman. He read, wrote, camped, and fished, and, in his words, “whatever I wanted to do.” He married, and by 1968 had remarried. But he was drawn to carpentry, working on construction sites up and down the West Coast, and writing his poetry.

His first book Journeyman’s Wages, rejected by publishers 59 times, won the Stafford Memorial Poetry Award and the Oregon Book Award when finally put to print. By 1998, he was poet-in-residence at Willamette University. He was a dynamic presenter of his poetry, giving readings to diverse audiences throughout the western United States and Europe.

His two travels to Russia served as inspiration for his second book, Studying Russian on Company Time, followed by four more, all of which were gathered in Cathedrals & Parking Lots: Collected Poems, published in 2019.

Predeceased by his second wife, Barbara, in 2012, Clem died of mesothelioma at his Dallas, Ore., home March 21, 2024. He is survived by his three children and four grandchildren.