Gerald Locklin

Poets and writers, left to right:: Ron Koertge (former Pasadena City College Professor of English; still going strong), Ben Pleasants (LAUSD teacher for 30 years; 1940-2013), Charles Bukowski (former U.S. Post Office employee; 1920-94), Steve Richmond (former UCLA law student and poetry mentor to Jim Morrison; 1941-2009), and Gerald Locklin (California State University, Long Beach Emeritus Professor of English; still going strong).
Photograph by Mark Sullivan, Los Angeles, 1975.

why I don't teach kindergarten
by Gerald Locklin

no night classes. 

The Best Year of Her Life

by Gerald Locklin 

When my two-year-old daughter

sees someone come through the door

whom she loves, and hasn't seen for a while,

and has been anticipating

she literally shrieks with joy. 

I have to go into the other room

so that no one will notice the tears in my eyes. 

Later, after my daughter has gone to bed,

i say to my wife, 

"She will never be this happy again,"

and my wife gets angry and snaps,

"Don't you dare communicate your negativism to her!"

And, of course, I won't, if I can possibly help it,

and, of course, I fully expect her

to have much joy in her life,

and, of course, I hope to be able

to contribute to that joy—

I hope, in other words, that she'll always

be happy to see me come through the door— 

but why kid ourselves—she, like every child,

has a life of great suffering ahead of her,

and while joy will not go out of her life,

she will one of these days cease to actually,

literally, jump and shriek for joy.

An Uncool Yul 

by Gerald Locklin

a lot of people seem to think

that it's just wonderful how yul brenner,

while he was dying of cancer,

made an anti-smoking commercial

that is playing now,

a year after his death. 

they say it's the most effective

anti-smoking commercial ever made. 

my first reaction is: what an ignominious

and mechanical form of immortality. 

my second is: how old was he anyway? what's

so great about old age? i can testify that

middle age ain't no 24-hour orgasm. 

my third thought is that he could at least

have provided a companion commercial

extolling all the joys and pleasures and

triumphs of his life that he associated with tobacco. 

if you think I'm a smoker,

you're wrong.

i haven't smoked in twenty years

and i only smoked for a couple of years

when i did. i gave up smoking so that

i wouldn't die thirty years younger

than yul brenner. 

but during the time that i smoked,

i really smoked up a storm. i just about out-smoked smokin' joe frazier. i'd come

a-smokin' out of bed each mornin', smoke

a blue streak through my waking hours, and

smoke myself into submission each evening. 

if i were to find out today that i were going

to die in a year i suspect that one of the first

things i might do is take up smoking again.

and i really do wonder what, a few years from

now, will be left to us to make each day

worth looking forward to. 

Biography of Gerald Locklin

from the Santa Barbara Independent: Charles Bukowski once called Gerald Locklin “one of the greatest undiscovered talents of our times.” With more than 3,000 published poems, stories, articles, reviews, and interviews and more than 125 books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, Locklin is also one of America’s most prolific writers. Paul Kareen Taylor has called him “a legend,” and noted poet Edward Field wrote of Locklin, “The male spirit in him remains honest, bighearted, sentimental, generous, gentle, vulnerable, but sassy in the face of adversity-qualities that could be applied to as few American poets as to presidents.” Field has also noted, “No one knows what to make of his poetry since he’s both a scholar and a populist, and poetry critics don’t like populism.” 

from geraldlocklin.org: A legend in the small press and beyond, Gerald Locklin is now a Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he taught from 1965 through 2007 and still teaches an occasional class. He is the author of over 150 books, chapbooks, and broadsides of poetry, fiction, and criticism, with over four thousand poems, stories, articles, reviews and interviews in periodicals. His monumental body of work spans a half century. Gerald Locklin’s books so far in 2013 include, along with Deep Meanings (www.presapress.com) a novella trilogy from Spout Hill Press: The Case of the Missing Blue Volkswagen: Come Back, Bear, and Last Tango in Long Beach (available individually from amazon.com), a reprint of Gerald Locklin: New and Selected Poems (2008) from Silver Birch Press (also on amazon.com), a single-story e-book of The Sun Also Rises in the Desert from Mendicant Bookworks (available on Smashwords), and Le dernier des damnes (The Last of the Damned), a full-length collection of the best of Gerald Locklin's stories and Bukowski memoirs from his Water Row Press Books, scheduled for publication by 13e Note Editions of Paris, France, in French translation in May, 2013 (http://www.13enote.com). To learn more about the poet, visit his fan page on Facebook.

More Poetry by Gerald Locklin

a sample of his poetry can be found at The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Please note: several of the links do not lead to the complete text of the poem named. Most, however, will get you to the titled poem.

Interviews with Gerald Locklin

from blues.gr, Orange County Weekly, raindog, Rusty Truck, Spike Magazine, and LA Weekly. The latter I wrote in June of 2000.

Part 2,  Part 3, and Part 4 of the Gerald Locklin interview at YouTube.

Gerald Locklin,  September 2008, during his reading at the Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival.
Photo by Paul Wellman. 

Charles Bukowski on Gerald Locklin:

 ”I like Gerald Locklin. I like his stuff. He swings from his heels. . . 

he's open and calls the shots. He's also funny and tells the truth.“

Locklin in his Long Beach home.