Gerald Locklin
requiem for the toad: selected poems of gerald locklin
Edited by Clint Margrave
NYQ Books
Reviewer: Shawn Pavey
Pick up any small to mid-sized poetry publication issued over the last forty years and, most likely, it will include a Gerald Locklin poem. When I served as an associate editor of The Main Street Rag Literary Journal in the mid ’90s, Locklin and a few other luminaries of the time (Alan Catlin, Lyn Lifhshin, and even Bukowsky, posthumously) gifted us with work that elevated The Rag from a small regional publication to a journal with international distribution. Locklin’s death in 2021 was met with great sadness among his friends, colleagues, and fans. The stories surrounding Locklin’s work as a Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach and his participation in the larger poetry community are legion, but “Toad,” as he referred to himself both in conversation and verse, was, as John Penner of the LA Times stated (and Clint Margrave quoted in his excellent foreword), “a rebel among academics and an academic among rebels.”
Locklin’s poetry is distinctive in its plain language stating complex things. His poems employed an “idiosyncratic way of sometimes using lower case punctuation in his poems and sometimes not,” as Margrave states in an Editor’s Note. Locklin’s friend, Patricia Cherin, called this “case moods” that depended on whether the poem was to be “iconoclast or classic.” Keeping this in mind is helpful in reading these selected works.
Consider the poem “my-six-year-old”:
i take my daughter out to lunch.
she reads the wine list
and remembers fine points of oenology.
she enquires about the function
of the cork and soon has mastered
the fermentation process from the grape
to vinegar. she’s sensible in ordering
and takes an interest in cuisine.
in fact she’s about the only member of
the gentler (sic) sex whose conversation i enjoy.
for one thing she may be the only girl i know
possessed of a genuine intellectual curiosity.
and she escapes the tyranny of the obvious.
if we are dining at el matador, and i explain
the principle of corrida, she doesn’t
take the side of the goddam bull.
she doesn’t tell me i shouldn’t drink so much.
she doesn’t want to marry me.
she doesn’t regale me with anecdotes of the office,
memorabilia of the student cafeteria.
she asks about paris; she asks about rome.
she finds the world funny; she finds its words
wonderful. We love each other.
i think I’ll go see her right now.
This is a perfect example of case moods. This is a father musing about the reasons he adores his child. Locklin is not attempting an elevated poem. This is an intimate look at a father realizing the person his child becomes.
There is a bitterness towards women in the third stanza that appears in other poems in this collection. At times, Locklin’s poems voice a frustration with women born from his failed marriages, one imagines. Some lines do not age well.
The conclusion of this poem emerges from that bitterness, however, as he lists the ways this child surprises and delights him. The poet’s love and appreciation become immediately apparent as the poem moves to that last line: “i think i’ll go see her now.”
To illustrate the elevated case mood, look at “Toad’s Handicap”:
As a result of lung problems
Toad discovers he has
reduced oxygen capacity.
The most serious consequence
seems to be that it’s more difficult
to run away from his responsibilities.
The Toad poems are comical nods to Berryman’s dream songs. Self-referential in the third person, the character Toad is the poet as he navigates the world. Here, Locklin is self-deprecating in response to a serious lung condition. This is Locklin in the classical motif.
In another example of this capitalization as classical motif, “Vincent Van Gogh: The Mulberry Tree, 1889,” Locklin quotes Van Gogh himself to describe the painting. Van Gogh’s words are flat, devoid of wonder, merely descriptive, but Locklin continues:
He neglected to mention that
he’d plugged the whole scene into
God’s own infinitely voltaged battery.
No one was ever made more alive than he.
It is not just that
he was creative:
he embodied creation…
The creator took possession of him.
Death and life were one:
both cracked with brain-music.
He may have known something
that we do not yet,
a reality defying words.
His brain exploded into galaxies.
While the reader is taken on the journey from the opening line to the end, the last five lines may be the most perfect lines written about Van Gogh. This is just one of the ekphrastic poems in this collection, but it stands apart from them by this very use of capitalization. Many other ekphrastic poems use no capitalization, where this one does. It’s a bit of a puzzle as to why. Maybe too much has been made of Locklin’s use and non-use of capitalization. On the subject of “case moods,” perhaps more attention has been placed on “case” and not enough on “mood.”
The final poem in this collection is also a fitting end to this review. In “at midnight,” we see more of Locklin’s tenderness toward his child.
at midnight, i look up
from the gilberto sorrentino book
that i’ve been reading under flashlight
and i notice the the dipper and the north star
have moved across the sky
and for the first time in my life
i feel the fact that i am in motion
that everything is,
and simultaneously for the first time in my life
i do not want to die,
i remember how sad for years it left my daughter
when her grandfather died,
and i don’t want to leave her with
a second sadness,
and for the first time in my life
i understand why anyone would want
to believe in reincarnation,
and would want to come back
to this world.
Locklin’s appeal as a poet is that the road from each first line to each last line has enough twists to keep the reader engaged, and this poem is no exception. Staring into a late night sky is a shared experience and a common occurrence. He puts down the book he was reading by flashlight to think about how spectacular it is to be alive; he wants to put off dying as long as possible. Locklin wanting to prevent his daughter’s sadness is as good a reason as any to believe in reincarnation.
This carefully curated and comprehensive collection of Locklin’s works is a must-have for any long-time fan and serves as the perfect introduction for those as yet uninitiated. It’s a stellar sampling of his philosophical musings, poems about the art that moved him, bar stool poems (Locklin used to drink heavily, and then he didn’t and saw the folly in wasting time where the only thing really talking is the booze), poems about deep love for family, and poems about being a certain age at different points throughout his life. This collection captures the spirit of a man who wrote poems, taught poems, and happily encouraged the foolhardy and misguided to keep writing poems. We’re glad he did it until the end.
Toad is gone. Long live Toad.
