The Mystical Exercycle

by Gerald Locklin. 2002 45 pages. The Chuckwagon Press, Sean Casey - editor and organizer, 9 Robandy Road, Andover, MA 01810

Book Review by Michael Basinski

This is a greatly focused collection of poems by poet Gerald Locklin and certainly reveals complete a phase that the poet has entered. The poems are reflective poems and philosophical contemplation poems and comment upon human conduct poems, which exhibit the frailty and stupidity of the human race and undermines the arrogance with which and in which we, so many of us, all of us, conduct our puny lives. These works are not so much about this and that or that time past or a memory but are immediately of the present, poet present in the world, interacting with the world and imagination, the imagination of it in words. Locklin really is in it as a poet in the world. He steps in it. He ain’t JUST watchin it. And these are the golden fruits of walking in the Garden of Eden poetry and there happens to be some animal shit. Watch out God!, Gods! And Goddesses! Toad is in paradise! The poems are a form of art word pure in the sense that they are involved in/with word fun - the ironic and the humor or ironic humor of fun with words, which is now essential Locklin and is now his program in poetry. The poems are a splendid and solid form of observation, reminds my of Resnikoff - the poem reality that waiting for the elevator takes forever. And also of Fluxus and performance poetry, for example my favorite poem in the collection, and one destined for the selected poems, the magnificent poem: “Where’s Wally?” Allow me to quote it completely: fuck Wally.