English Division Programs

######################################

######################################

From PCC To UCLA

A Transfer Event for PCC English Majors

Representatives of the UCLA English Department

Discuss Transferring to and Majoring in English at UCLA

Thursday, October 16, noon to 1pm

 PCC’s Circadian (the north end of the cafeteria building)

All PCC Students Are Invited to Attend

########################################

FREE LUNCH

For English Majors

 or those considering the major

The English Majors' Open House

Thursday, November 13th

11:30 AM to 1:00 PM

Shatford Library Terrace Room

CONTACT: Dr. Tooktook Thongthiraj

dxthongthiraj@pasadena.edu

SPONSORED by: Student Services Fund

& the English Department

FREE LUNCH

########################################

War Stories: an anthology by PCC Veterans and their families

My colleague Prof. Pat Rose recently wrote to faculty about her project, an anthology to be known as War Stories. She is collecting writing by PCC Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and their families for the anthology.

Here is what she told us in her letter:

"With the help of my colleagues in the English Division for the past six years, I have been collecting copies of essays, stories, poems, and letters from PCC Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and their families to document an important chapter int the lives of many of our students.  My goal is to preserve their writing in an anthology entitled War Stories for future PCC students and for our community who want to know about the experiences of our veterans and of their return home. Through their writing, we will better understand the circumstances of our time.

"[Students] can contribute their writing to the War Stories anthology by leaving their submissions in [Prof. Rose's] mailbox in C245. For each submission, a signed permission release must be included; these submission forms are available in the English Division, C245.

"Please note that War Stories will be an in-house publication for Shatford Library; none of the submissions will be published for profit by [Prof. Rose] or PCC."

If you have questions, you may contact
Prof. Rose: pcrose@pasadena.edu
or Prof. McCabe: cjmccabe@pasadena.edu

1A: Peter Singer (1946--)

Peter Singer and pig.  Singer is best known for his book,  Animal Liberation (1975), that was a turning point
 for  animal rights activists upon its publication. He talks about animal  rights with Stephen Colbert at this site.

All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot
shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.

--Peter Singer

You can find general information about philosopher Peter Singer (don't confuse him with Peter W. Singer, an expert on national security issues) at the following websites: Princeton University, The European Graduate School, and bio.com. It should not be a surprise that The Animal Liberation Front also argues in favor of his positions. At bigthink.com you can find numerous video interviews with him discussing his philosophy. Essays by him appear at Project Syndicate. An interview he did with The New York Times, May 27, 2015, appears here.

Singer is also the founder of The Life You Can Save. It is an organization that promotes charitable giving to the poorest people in the world, and it offers guidance to potential donors about who to give to and how much, based on an individual's annual income. 

What is utilitarianism, the philosophy that Singer is linked with, sometimes simplistically? You can find two descriptions of utilitarianism on the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy websites.

To be a utilitarian means that you judge actions as right or wrong in
 accordance with whether they have good consequences. So you try to do
 what will have the best consequences for all of those affected.

--Peter Singer

Peter Singer: Some People are More Equal than Others

Peter Singer is hailed as the world's most influential philosopher. But when he declared it was acceptable to kill disabled babies, he unleashed a firestorm.

(London) Independent, July 1, 2004

by Johann Hari

Peter Singer's story begins in the Nazi death-camps, and he has been circling them all his life. One of his grandparents died in Treblinka; two others died on the way. They had all been minor stars in the 1930s Golden Age of the Viennese intellect, mixing with Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, and Alfred Adler. Today, their grandson is routinely compared to the Nazis who herded them into the gas chambers.

The Wall Street Journal recently compared Singer with Hitler's deputy, Martin Bormann. A US Congressman has described him as "taking the Josef Mengele chair in bio-ethics" at Princeton University. Diane Coleman, the leader of the disability rights group Not Dead Yet, describes Singer as "a public advocate of genocide and the most dangerous man on earth". Sitting neatly in a London hotel, Peter Singer is munching a scone and gassing nobody. He is skeletal, but smiles faintly at me. "Shall we begin?" he asks.

"Do you remember the first time you were compared to a member of the Third Reich?" I ask, all the while wondering if it is possible to ask this question without seeming rude. He does not pause. "Yes. It was in Germany in 1989," he says. His voice is so soft that half of what he says is not audible when I play the tape later. "I was invited to speak at a conference organized by the parents of disabled children. There were so many protesters - saying that I was trying to revive eugenics and so on - that the invitation was cancelled." At another German lecture later that year, his glasses were smashed before a mob chanting, "Singer raus [Singer out], Singer raus!" . . . . . 

Singer's moral system is called preference utilitarianism, and evolved from the 19th-century philosophy of John Stuart Mill. It sounds convoluted, but many people in the post-religious societies of Europe take its central premise for granted. It has one basic idea: to be moral, you must do whatever will most satisfy the preferences of most living things. Morality doesn't come from heaven or the stars; it comes from giving as many of us as possible what we want and need.

This isn't some dry academic theory. It affects the most important decisions in every person's life. Say you are old and sick and want to die. Under the old Judaeo-Christian ethic, you have an immortal soul given to you by God, and He will reclaim it from you when He's good and ready. Under preference utilitarianism, your preference - which harms nobody else - should be met, with a lethal injection from a friendly doctor if necessary. The scale of Singer's intellectual ambition is staggering. He is trying to lead an ethical revolution unparalleled since paganism was beaten and banished by the Judaeo-Christian ethic. "You can't expect such a radical shift," he says dryly, "without a few fights."

To read all of this interview click on this.

OPINION

Good Charity, Bad Charity

By PETER SINGER

International Herald Tribune (the global edition of The New York Times)

Published: August 10, 2013

You are thinking of donating to a worthy cause. Good. But to which cause should you give?

If you seek help from professional philanthropy advisers, the chances are that they won’t have much to say about this vital question. They will guide you, to be sure, through an array of charitable options. But the prevailing assumption in their field is that we shouldn’t, or perhaps can’t, make objective judgments about which options are better than others.

Take Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, one of the world’s largest philanthropic service organizations. Its Web site offers a downloadable pamphlet with a chart showing areas to which a philanthropist might give: health and safety; education; arts, culture and heritage; human and civil rights; economic security; and environment. The Web site then asks, “What is the most urgent issue?” and answers by saying, “There’s obviously no objective answer to that question.”

Is this true? I don’t think so. Compare, for instance, two of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ categories: “health and safety” and “arts, culture and heritage.” To me it seems clear that there are objective reasons for thinking we may be able to do more good in one of these areas than in another.

To read all of this opinion piece click on this.

Stephen Colbert talks with Singer about his book The Life You Save.

Singer mentions the film Central Station in his essay,
"The Singer Solution to World Poverty."
You can watch the complete film, above.

The Ice Bucket Way of Giving

A Better Ice Bucket Challenge

THE NEW YORKER, SEPT. 5, 2014

BY MICHAEL SPECTER

This has been a summer of sustained outrage: tenth-century zealots committing unspeakable atrocities in Syria and Iraq; a season of violence and hate in Israel and Gaza; and, in Ukraine, the invasion of a sovereign nation by a power-mad autocrat. There has, however, been at least one bright spot on the human frontier: the “ice-bucket challenge,’’ which so far has raised more than a hundred million dollars for the A.L.S. Association, which supports research and care for those living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Last year, the organization raised less than a quarter of that sum.

Unless you spent the summer in Antarctica, the mechanics of the challenge are no doubt familiar: dump a bucket of ice water on your head or make a donation—most people do both—and then challenge others to do it, too, and post it all on Facebook or some other social-media site. It has been a brilliant campaign, an ever-changing video chain letter, quick, easy to understand, a way to feel good about yourself while dripping, briefly, in ice water during the summer’s hottest days.

George W. Bush did it, and challenged Bill Clinton to do it, too. So did Gisele Bündchen. Matt Damon, who has long been committed to easing sanitation problems in the developing world, used toilet water. Bill Gates’s challenge was very Bill Gates: to drench himself, he designed a new contraption. According to the BBC, more than two million ice-bucket-related videos have been posted on Facebook, and twenty-eight million people have uploaded, commented on, or liked ice-bucket-related posts. Justin Bieber’s video, on Instagram, has more than a million “like”s.

It would seem churlish, then, to argue that all of this cheerful decency has been misplaced. A.L.S. is a horrible disease, causing intense suffering to its victims and to all those who love them. In a world with unlimited resources and bottomless generosity, A.L.S. research would deserve ten, even twenty times the money that it has just received. But we don’t live in such a world. And, while most people are repulsed by the idea, when we spend money on saving and prolonging some lives, we are making judgments about how much those lives (and others that we don’t try as hard to save) are worth.

The complete essay can be found at The New Yorker's website. Click on this link to read it.

The Ice Bucket Racket

THE NEW YORK TIMES, November 14, 2014

by IAN MCGUGAN

The essay can be found at The New York Times website. Click on this link to read it.

Extreme Poverty and the World Bank

Above, Ali Velshi of Al Jazeera interviewed Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group, on April 9, 2014, about the World Bank's plan to end extreme poverty by 2030. Learn more about the World Bank Group here. Learn more about Jim Yong Kim here. On the same topic, you can read "Fixing the World, Bang-for-the-Buck Edition."

What are young philanthropists doing today? For one example, read "Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz: Young Silicon Valley Billionaires Pioneer New Approach to Philanthropy." The story appeared in The Washington Post, December 26, 2014. In The Atlantic, June 15, 2015, Derek Thompson addresses the notion of "The Most Efficient Way to Save a Life."

Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. 

It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.

-- Peter Singer 

1B: Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), 
Los Angeles writer and one-time U.S. postal worker.

What can we read by Charles Bukowski in English 1B? Here's one: "my old man."  How many books did Bukowski write?  Dozens and dozens.  Short stories. Novels.  Poetry. Letters. He wrote a screenplay, too. Go to these sites to learn more about him: "Celebrating Charles Bukowski, 'poet laureate of L.A. lowlife,'"  "Moving beyond the Charles Bukowski American lowlife cliche" and Bukowski at the Poetry Foundaiton.  Go here to get a partial list of his publications. He is also extensively represented on YouTube.  Just go there and search his name. There is one documentary about Bukowski called Born Into This. You'll learn that he "was appalled by Mickey Mouse," his time at the post office, and the importance of publisher John Martin on his writing career.

After reading Bukowski's "my old man"  in class one day, I thought I'd resurrect a post from the Huntington Libary, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens  exhibition of Bukowski's books, drawings, and letters that ran through February 14, 2011.  It seems like an odd place for Bukowski's papers to end up, but so be it.  The place that has 14,000 different kinds of plants, paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and Mary Cassatt, paintings of "Blue Boy" and "Pinkie," historical documents like the Gutenberg Bible and letters by Washington and Lincoln, is now keeping company with Bukowski's papers.

Bukowski and his wife Linda at the races.
 A more likely place for his papers.
  Photograph by Michael Montfort

A Bukowski drawing of life at the racetrack.

The world is a funny place. Bukowski once said as much: "Man, man, it’s a funny world. We’ve got everything, but we can’t have it."



It's not likely that a joke or advice can be deciphered in the Huntington's Bukowski press kit with information about the 2001 exhibition. But who knows? Turn to the Bukowski page and Bukowski American Author on the web, and read  to learn more about him.

Now for some other Bukowski in the news: The FBI kept a file on Bukowski, as reported by Emily Keeler in the Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2013. To read the story go here.  

Charles Bukowski, aka Buk, the artist.

1B: Carolyn Forche (b. April 28,1950)

Time to learn some things about Carolyn Forche?  Here goes:  Poetry Foundation, American Academy of Poets, Modern Academic Poetry, and Blue Flower Arts, while her website is under construction.

Interviews with Forche: Christopher Nelson, David Wright, PBS NewsHour and excerpts.

In many places Forche has talked about 

The Colonel

BY CAROLYN FORCHÉ

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some
of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the
ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
                                                                                     

May 1978

All lines from “The Colonel” from The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché, Copyright (c) 1981 by Carolyn Forché. Originally appeared in Women’s International Resource Exchange. Used by Permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Additional territory: Virginia Barber, William Morris Agency, 1325 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019

Source: The Country Between Us (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1981)

Forche reads "The Colonel"

Search the web. Find videos of Forche reading "The Colonel." Which reading do you prefer? Take your pick. And then post the links in the comments section here of videos that you think are worth watching.  You might also wish to post more than one link and offer a comparison between two or more readings.  Thanks for your help.

Forche interview with Bill Moyers 

Click on the link above to read an excellent interview Bill Moyers conducted with Forche, or read the excerpt below, to get some information about Forche's experience in El Salvador in 1978 that informed her poem "The Colonel."  This interview was reprinted in Centrum, November 24, 2008, under the title, "Don't Talk to Poets."

Moyers: Your mention of El Salvador brings to mind "The Colonel." It's the poem of yours most quoted in anthologies and most used in classes. How did it come about?

Forché: I was in El Salvador. It was 1978. Very few Americans who didn't work for the embassy were there. There were a few Peace Corps people, but it was an unusual occurrence for an American to come into the country. I was being taken around and educated about conditions in Salvador by members of Claribel Alegría's family. My presence in the country came to the attention of the military, they were intrigued and wondered if I wasn't also working for the U.S. government because, in a way, everyone thinks that all North Americans there are doing that.

So officers began to want to talk to me. I realize today that they were hoping that the United States would desire their services and pay them for information and intelligence and so on, but I didn't know that then. it became clear to me, however, as I was having these meetings with military officers, that they were very upset about the human rights policy of President Carter. They believed that the United States was being hypocritical in its relation to them: they were still getting support, but they were embarrassed because they were being insulted internationally about their human rights behavior.

On this occasion I was taken to dinner at a very high-ranking officer's house and I don't think he realized that what I said about myself was true–I really was just a twenty-seven-year-old American poet. He got a little intoxicated and angry, and he wanted to send a message to the Carter administration. He wanted me to go back to Washington and tell President Carter, "We've had enough of this human rights policy," and his actions were his way of demonstrating his contempt.

Moyers: He literally poured ears on the floor?

Forché: He poured them on the table. I learned later there were a number of officers who had a practice of keeping bounty of various kinds. Some Vietnam veterans also told me that had happened in Vietnam, so what I saw was not as uncommon as I thought when I first saw it. I remember feeling sick and dizzy, but nothing happened to me. Everything was fine. His wife brought us out into the living room for coffee and tried to make everything better because she felt the dinner party was ruined. But he was not the worst man I met, not even the worst officer. In fact, this officer tried to warn priests when they were in danger.

Moyers: "Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground." Are they listening to something?

Forché: I'm happy you know that about the image, because sometimes people are puzzled, they don't understand why I describe in this way. But there's an expression, "ear to the ground," you know the way you can hear a train coming if you put your ear to the ground? I think that when we're writing a poem, sometimes our associational memory magically makes these connections. There were many such moments writing "The Colonel."

I thought the moon in the poem was just the moon until someone pointed out that it seems to be a white lamp shining in a box in an interrogation room. People have interpreted many features of this poem, but when I wrote it, I was just trying to capture details so that I would remember. I didn't even think it was a poem. I thought it was a piece of a memoir that got mixed up with my poetry book. So when a scholar read the manuscript and said, "This is the best one. This is the best poem," I said, "Oh, no. That's a mistake. That's not a poem." It took me years to accept it as a poem and not just a block of memory.

Moyers: The Colonel, what happened to him?

Forché: He's dead.

Moyers: The victims?

Forché: Dead.

Moyers: But the poem survived, so for whatever consolation it is, memory has a chance.

Forché: Yes. That's the hope.

Moyers: Had I reported that incident as a journalist, I would have been quite literal: who, what, when, where, and why. What's the relationship between these facts as a journalist would report them and the truth that you're trying to reveal?

Forché: Some writers whom I admire very much say that facts often have little to do with the truth. What I was trying to do with this piece, as I finally allowed it to be in "The Country Between Us," was to acknowledge that something important had actually occurred. But the poem also contains a truth about the brutality of that situation which seems to reach deeply into people. When I came back to the United States and began reading the poem, I noticed that some people were very moved by it and others were very angered by it. And some people simply didn't believe it, they said it could not have happened.

There was a fierce denial and yet several years later a reporter for The Washington Post interviewed soldiers in El Salvador and they apparently talked about the practice of taking ears and all of that. In fact, one of these soldiers read the news story about his practice of taking ears and was so proud of the story that he actually clipped it out and laminated it and carried it in his wallet. Because now he was famous, you know, for this.

Moyers: That's what can happen to a journalist's account. But the poem is a condemnation.

Forché: It is a condemnation. As a journalist, maybe you wouldn't have been able to use the obscenity, and perhaps you wouldn't have been able to quote him directly. But more than that, I don't think it would've happened to you because I don't think the message was intended for the press. It was intended for a quiet communication back to Washington, and unfortunately they told the wrong person. They told a poet.

Moyers: Lesson for politicians and military leaders: Never talk to poets.

Forché: Never.

from The New Yorker

Poetry in Extremis

posted by Robin Creswell

Feb. 13, 2014

Can atrocity be the subject matter of poetry? Carolyn Forché’s prose poem “The Colonel” was published in “The Country Between Us” (1981), a volume whose best-known poems concern the civil war in El Salvador. That conflict was just beginning when Forché travelled to the country, on a Guggenheim fellowship, to work with Amnesty International. “The Colonel” describes the poet’s dinner at the home of a military man. After the meal—“rack of lamb, good wine”—the officer leaves the room and comes back with a grocery bag full of human ears, which he spills onto the dinner table. He tells the poet that human-rights workers can go fuck themselves, then raises his glass in an ironic salute and says, “Something for your poetry, no?”

The excitement generated by Forché’s early work—Denise Levertov called her “a poet who’s doing what I want to do,” and Jacobo Timerman suggested that she was the next Neruda—grew out of a sense that she was reinventing the political lyric at a moment of profound depoliticization. While her contemporaries wrote poems of domestic unhappiness and the supermarket sublime (so this story goes), Forché was making engagé poetry out of Reagan-era dirty wars. Forché herself shied away from such claims. The poetry that interested her was not political, per se, but was what she called a “poetry of witness.” This was not the work of partisans but of those who, like Amnesty International, stood in solidarity with “the party of humanity.” Witness poetry was testimonial rather than polemical. The opening line of “The Colonel” states, simply, “What you have heard is true.”

Twelve years after publishing “The Country Between Us,” Forché edited an impressive anthology, “Against Forgetting” (1993), which argued for the poetry of witness as a coherent tradition in twentieth-century poetry. In her introduction, Forché located the intellectual origins of witness poetry in the work of European philosophers and poets—Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès—whose lives and writings were marked by the experience of the Holocaust. In the aftermath of the death camps, such thinkers conceived of the poem as a stay against oblivion, “an event and the trace of an event.” Witness poetry also made ethical claims on its readers, who were asked to recognize, at a bare minimum, “that-which-happened.” As Wisława Szymborska writes in “The Hunger Camp As Jaslo”:

Write it. Write. In ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they were given no food,
they all died of hunger. “All. How many?
It’s a big meadow. How much grass
for each one?” Write: I don’t know.
History counts its skeletons in round numbers.

Alongside poets whose primary trauma was the Holocaust, Forché included works by Latin Americans, Russians, Eastern Europeans, and Arabs, often in remarkably good translations. The anthology made it possible to link the fractured stanzas of Celan (“no one / bears witness for the / witness”) to the lyrics of Mahmoud Darwish, another poet of traces and inscriptions, whose verse establishes a counter-history of Palestine. If the poetry of witness is in some sense an invented tradition, then Forché’s anthology was nevertheless a valuable one. By placing such disparate poets together in one book, she allowed the reader to make unexpected, even startling, connections, which is what anthologies do at their best.

To read the rest of this essay click here.

Robyn Creswell is poetry editor of The Paris Review and an assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University.

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.