Clemens Starck was born in 1937. A Princeton dropout and former merchant seaman, he has supported his literary and intellectual interests for more than fifty years by working with his hands, mainly as a carpenter and construction foreman. He is the author of six books of poetry, including STUDYING RUSSIAN ON COMPANY TIME, OLD DOGS, NEW TRICKS, and CATHEDRALS & PARKING LOTS: COLLECTED POEMS, and has performed his poems widely throughout the West. In 1998, Starck was the Witter Bynner Fellow at Willamette University and received both the Wiliam Stafford Memorial Poetry Award and the Oregon Book Award in Poetry for his collection, Journeyman's Wages (Story Line Press, 1995). A widower, he has three grown children and lives on forty-some acres in the foothills of the Coast Range in western Oregon.