Michael Basinski  Book Reviews
may 2000

"One of the greatest undiscovered talents our time…I like Gerald Locklin."
-Charles Bukowski

Reviews of New Books by Gerald Locklin

• Go West, Young Toad (Selected Writings), edited by Mark Weber. Water Row Press, P.O. Box 438, Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776. 1998. 241 pages. $14.95(paper).
  
• The Firebird Poems (New Edition), edited by Donna Hilbert. Event Horizon Press, P.O. Box 2006, Palm Springs, California 92263. 1999. 166 pages. $12.95.

     Charles Bukowski wrote, "One of the greatest undiscovered talents of our time…I like Gerald Locklin." Once this might have been a true statement, but these days Locklin is discovered. You can discover him too. Go West, Young Toad and The Firebird Poems are both retrospective collections that draw from the immense amount of poetry and prose published by Gerald Locklin over the last 35 years. Both offer representative views of Locklin and his poetry and prose. Both are essentially different. One is not better than the other is. They are just different.
     Mark Weber, who is Locklin's bibliographer, edited Go West, Young Toad. Weber arranges the poems and prose in this collection to form a chronological, autobiographical narrative. The tale of Toad (a Locklin persona) begins in Rochester, New York, where Locklin grew up a third generation Irish Catholic and working class. He had an extended family (his mother had 13 brothers and sisters), and he attended parochial school, was an athlete, brilliant and an alter boy! The poems and prose trace Locklin's move west, thought marriages, drinking, university jobs, parent hood, professor hood and literary life.
     As a primer to Gerald Locklin and his writing Go West, Young Toad is a fitting introduction because it splendidly fleshes out the life of the poet. The collection introduces the novice to the themes the support that vast amount of writing that Locklin has done. The Locklin of these poems is an opinionated, honest, sometimes inept, anti-hero, outsider, insider, professor, drinker/drunk and on the wagon, intellectual, husband and loving father. He comes to light fully in Go West, Young Toad as a dedicated and mature artist.
     Above Locklin's many qualities stands his strength as an individual. His self stands against the ugly side of the American culture, which is arrogant, trendy and fashionable. This stress is the impetus that fuels the highly focused, designed, meticulously unadorned poetry that Locklin generates with such discipline and proficiency. Locklin's muscular identity has endeared him to many a fan.
     Among the many great selections that Mark Weber makes for Go West, Young Toad is Locklin's triumphant poem Beer.

Beer

It takes a lot to get you there, but it won't kill
      you either.

Kids like it. The foam makes a fine mustache. When
      they go to sleep they dream of goofy pink dragons
      and slippery little smiling fish.

To the adolescent it is the first taste of the earth's
      bitterness. He has to pretend it gets him high.
      He is afraid it will give him zits, and maybe it
      will. He gives it to his girl and thinks it is
      because of it she gives herself to him.

She doesn't like the taste of it and never will. She
      doesn't have the thirst for it. She is afraid
      it will give her a gut, and maybe it will.
      Eventually she'll be a little insulated when it's
      offered her. And probably should be.

But the best of friendships are formed over it. It
      helps men to speak to each other, a difficult
      thing these days. It lets men sing without
      embarrassment of auld lang syne and of the sheep
      that went astray somewhere along the line. It
      goes excellent with pool and pickled eggs,
      beef jerky and baseball games. Contrary to
      popular opinion, it is good for the kidneys,
      affords them exercise. It is good for the
      appetites.

We all go beyond it; we always come back to it. It
      is a friend who eases us through our philosophies.
      It is the friend we talk to about our women,
      the one who agrees with us that
      they are not all that important. It
      restores our courage in the face of cowardly
      sobrieties. It laughs with us at our most
      serious sonnets, weeps at our pratfalls. It
      remembers us: it takes us back.

Finally, this blessed beer, it eases us towards
      sleep.

     Donna Hilbert wonderfully edits The Firebird Poems. Her selected
Locklin is a selected poems organized under various subsections like, "the
horse of talent," or "stalking oneself." The book draws its title from the
poem my daughter and the firebird, in which the firebird is an allegorical
symbol for both Locklin's artist and intellectual fire and the fire of his
endless love, in this instance, for his daughter. So then, this collection
is comprised of poems more gentle, reflective and poetically introspective
than the gruff and cranky poems of the hard drinking, gregarious barfly side
of Gerald Locklin. The collection opens with the poem my six-month old
daughter.


my six month old daughter
must sleep in a strange crib tonight.

who can blame her for crying?

every bed I've ever slept in
has seemed strange.


     One immediately recognizes that the strange bed in which Locklin sleeps is the world. Essentially, much of the tension in Locklin's poems, therefore, his insights, come form the fact that he sees life differently, more ironic, than most. This results in a wonderful, straightforward type of American individualistic poem. Donna Hilbert's selection reveals a frank but essentially deeply philosophical poet, unafraid of his intellect, opinion or his own poetics. The poet is alone in the world and has to form and defend his own real and, of course, imaginary existence. As a humble monk along the road of life, he sometimes takes the wrong road. However, this too is the spiritual path of the perceptive poet. Writing, for Locklin, is thinking, and thinking results form living, really living in the world of men and women. He writes in his poem franz kline meets time magazine, "the world requires the mind// the mind requires the world."

     There is some overlap of material in these two books. However, much less than one would expect. Combined, they offer two unique visions of Gerald Locklin. Both of them are correct images, because Locklin is, upon investigation, a very complicated poet and man. He has a multitude of points of view, and they change. He is, above all, human. He is so human, in fact, so unique an individual that he has chosen the true path of the poet, and that path follows the truth of poetry. Locklin is no academic masturbater. He, therefore, is something very special, a real poet, and a poet that has by fate and choice chosen to write outside the mainstream, away from the sticking sewer of dung that is so much of American poetry.

A FIST FULL OF LOCKLIN

AND A

FEW LOCKLIN'S MORE

• The Back East Poems. Liquid Paper Press, P.O. Box 4973, Austin, Texas, 78765. 1999. 64 pages. $5.00.

• The Sporting Life and Other Poems. JVCBooks, 509 N. 12th Avenue, Arcadia, Florida 34266. 1999. 52 pages. $10.00.

• Hemingway Colloquium: The Poet Goes to Cuba. Event Horizon Press, P.O. Box 2006, Palm Springs, California 92263. 1999. 42 pages. $24.95.

     The Back East Poems are a collection of poems about a Gerald Locklin's reading tour through western New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago and up to Michigan. It's a Locklin traveling book of poems about motels, snowstorms, poetry readings and friends and about Locklin's children and grandchildren. Locklin is about as comfortable with the word as a poet can get. He is gracious and friendly to those who host his readings and names them. Certainly, those noted are small press entrepreneurs: Lords of the streety underground, real and reality, grit and sweet sweat of humanity Poem Gods like Dan Sicoli and Bob Borgatti from Slipstream Magazine in Niagara Falls and the fantastic, erotically CAT poet of Comanche Trail Ohio Cheryl Townsand of torn fishnets, red lipsticks and Santa bags full of leather, lace, chains, XXX videos, tender and lovefullness, hot poem pancake breakfast, maple surip-stick and sticker stuck. Sorry for the riverrun of words. Well, aside from the people he meets, there is always Locklin essentially on a journey through life. In this collection we have a snippets of poetry as a daily, meditative exercises. Poetry is a place, like back east, where Locklin goes to recharge, to again become an artist in the snowstorm of America.
     The Sporting Life and Other Poems collection is not located in any physical place. The poems are drawn from various magazines in which they first appeared. The majority of the poems are about painters and their works, like Edgar Degas's At the Milliner's, Stuart Davis's Ebb Tide - Provincetown, and Richard Diebenkorn's Untitled, 1992. In each poem Locklin writes about a painting, painter or both and allows the poem via the description to define an edge of his self, the self writing the poem. An introspective collection the poems paint a Locklin who is all an artist and draws his poetics and artistic philosophy from visual arts and the lives of artists. Perhaps the message is that art and artist are not at all separated. Since this might be the case, art is greater than the object it is. Art, the painting, the poem, is the artist, the poet. If true, and so it seems, then owning this book is more important than those $35.00 coffee table art books. This one must be there. On top of the pile. Let Aunt Willowmeana read on and maybe learn. Well, maybe. But you should, good reader, you should.
     The Hemingway Colloquium: The Poet Goes to Cuba is as fine a book as Locklin has ever written. His clarity, wit, satirical view and acute observations into the human condition have never been so sustained or so accurate. He admiration for Hemingway has here found acute accuracy. And these poems, in the Hemingway context, are among Locklin's best. He is a such fine wine in this collection. The price is steep, but again, we are talking about a life time wine. He writes fresh, straight from the hip and heart. The long narrative forms Locklin employs are simple, crisp and rhythmically perfect strokes of the pen. He writes through airports, tourist busses, about various dinners, bars, swimming pools and flirtations, his state of health, and about the beers he does not drink. The poems and prose are flawless and unadorned, much like Hemingway's vignettes, short stories and novels. The phrase structure of the poems is controlled, and they never intrude into the poetry. All the tiny instances of life are here given dramatic and philosophical import. The poet is confident, yet venerable and vulnerable, human and heroic. Reflective, strong, independent and in touch with his governing emotions, Locklin has here made art to match his master. Such a strong book. Such a strong, strong, well crafted book. Locklin here is easily at his best.

Michael Basinski

Michael Basinski is the Assistant Curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection of the University Libraries, SUNY at Buffalo.

His poems, articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including: Proliferation, Terrible Work, Deluxe Rubber Chicken, Boxkite, The Mill Hunk Herald, Yellow Silk, The Village Voice, Object, Oblek, Score, Generator, Juxta, Poetic Briefs, Another Chicago Magazine, Sure: A Charles Bukowski Newsletter, Moody Street Irregulars: A Jack Kerouac Newsletter, Kiosk, Earth's Daughters, Atticus Review, Mallife, Taproot, Transmog, B-City, House Organ, First Intensity, Mirage No.4/Period(ical), Lower Limit Speech, Texture, R/IFT, Chain, Antenym, Bullhead, Poetry New York, First Offence, and many others. For more than twenty years he has performed his choral voice collages and sound texts with his intermedia performance ensemble: The Ebma, which has released two Lps: SEA and Enjambment. His books include: Idyll (Juxta Press, 1996), Heebee-jeebies (Meow Press, 1996), SleVep (Tailspin Press, 1995), Vessels (Texture Press, 1993), Cnyttan (Meow Press, 1993), Mooon Bok (Leave Books, 1992) and Red Rain Too (1992) and Flight to the Moon (1993) from Run Away Spoon Press.