Life Force

”They are the hardest to write, because they come out of the most deep and personal emotions,“ he says. ”There is nothing more important to you than your children, and you don’t want to get them wrong. You struggle so to get them exactly right. They are written with tears in your eyes.“

His poems also tell about his nights at the Jazz Bakery, women, his health (which spiraled downward in 1993), Abstract Expressionists, drinking, abstinence and his afternoon laps in the YMCA pool. He modestly says he is only familiar with topics like art and jazz, not an expert. Engaging his readers with a sly, perceptive intelligence, he can be traditionally poetic, dry, and complex like a Franz Kline brush stroke. But he can be funny, occasionally self-mocking, and as direct as a Roy Hargrove trumpet solo. Take this sample: ”he knew he was in serious troublewhen he caught himself rooting, on the tape delays,for teams that he already knew had lost.the next step would be betting on them.“

”For teachers and writers, ideas are in process,“ Locklin says. ”We don‘t walk around with a Decalogue written in stone. We are testing our ideas all the time.“ Life Force, his next collection of poems from Event Horizon, focuses on our hope for immortality. Locklin’s own health problems, which climaxed when blood clots made their way to his lungs and almost killed him in 1993, have ushered in a more practiced meditation on death, and the wish to live on through work, family and friends. His interest in biologist E.O. Wilson‘s latest book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, is yet another example of Locklin’s desire to continue expanding his poetic subjects.

”We are creatures of our evolution and DNA, mixed with our cultural experiences,“ he says, peering through his glasses. ”These new poems often celebrate what Dylan Thomas called ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flowerDrives my green age.’ The same life force that drives nature, drives us.“