STUDYING RUSSIAN ON COMPANY TIME

Poetry. Between his poems, Clemens Starck reflects upon the act of language: Trying to grasp another language is tantalizing. It requires considerable guesswork, becoming itself an act of imagination. The museum described in the next poem is a fiction, a metaphor, a composite of the various museums I visited in Russia. The tour is a fantasy. In fact, Russian history itself is a kind of strange fairy tale or fantasy. What began as a whim, learning the Russian language, became an obsession for Claemens Starck, a process by which to fathom a baffling nation. Clemens Starck works as a carpenter at Oregon State University in Corvallis and teaches poetry classes at Willamette University.