The First Decade: 1968-1978
Duane Locke (edited by Alan Britt & Paul B. Roth)
Bitter Oleander Press
ISBN: 978-0-9786335-7-8

Reviewer: Michael Adams


          Duane Locke has been a prolific and influential poet, who at age ninety is still going strong. He began writing poetry rather late in life, in the early 1960s, but hasn’t stopped or slowed down in the ensuing five decades. The First Decade, at 330 pages, demonstrates the arc of his work over this revolutionary, often chaotic, period in American art and culture.

          Locke’s poems are filled with precise and vivid imagery. He is a well-known nature photographer and painter with a keen eye for the natural world that infuses his poetry and gives it such a clear and crystalline quality. Here is one of his earliest poems, “Coral Cities” from his first book, Inland Oceans (presented in its entirety):

the movement towards coral cities, to see,
not to blink, not to turn away, not
to call for the chalk marks across a blackboard,
not to ask for the bones in the archeologist’s
frozen street, not to step into the daydream’s
infinite acts, but to see, to know what
is in the hand of the child standing by
the slaughtered buffalo, to compare the present hand
with the hand of smoke rising from the old teeth
piled in forgotten desk drawers, to forego
the cosmological gardens that are given
to sleepers behind the barbed wire, to
twist out form the moment of idols, to move
toward the entrance of coral cities,
where the skeletons of animals
build apartments for the living.

          There is a driving energy to this poem that speeds the reader relentlessly towards the conclusion of those startling final lines. Locke is telling us to see what is right in front of us, not to analyze or catalog but simply to see and not turn away. This direct seeing allows for startling images and juxtapositions, such as this line from “For a Dead Poet”: “Your hands rowed through rivers of wildflowers.”—this one from “Roots”: “The bank I stand on/ is bright with the deep language/ of roots.”

          At times Locke reminds me of Pablo Neruda, at other times of Hart Crane. “Out The Door” has more than a little of the great Chilean poet to it:

Out the door
Out the never to be opened door
Through the climate of steel
Through the streets where the metal dice
have eaten away
the curls of balconies

…

Away from the drunken bricklayer pushing
a wheelbarrow filled with white hair

In the tree
In all the affirmation and doubt of the tree
In the tree

          The repetitions drive the movement always forward, through a series of surrealist images towards a final stanza that may appear simple and declarative yet is an absolutely perfect ending. The poem hammers the reader with a series of words that drive the poem in a confusing number of directions: out, out; through, through; away; and finally settling “In the tree,” a place that may be full of “affirmation and doubt” but still leaves the reader with a solid place to stand.

          The 1960s and 1970s were a fluid time of new schools and movements in the arts, a time when artists and activists were incessantly issuing proclamations and declarations, and it’s not surprising that Locke was the founder of a school of poetry knows as Immanentism. The opening poem of his book The Immanentist Sutras (1973) declares boldly: “this is a poetry without beards    even without/ a commune of chins or dynamite…” and goes on to assert: “immanentism/ is a muzzle becoming a horse and a chain/ becoming raw ore it finds the shadow of a fly/ to be as great as the fly and greater than/ the fly swatter or congress….”

          Some things survive the test of time better than others, and while there is much of great value in the arts, politics, and culture that endures from the 1960s and 1970s, there is also rightly much that has fallen by the wayside. Still, The Immanentist Sutras needs to be read in the context of those years. Doing so, we can extract some enduring kernels of truth that drill to the heart of Locke’s poetry, such as the phrasing above—“a chain becoming raw ore”—that moves us towards the innate nature of manmade things, and is one of the key qualities of Locke’s poetry..

          I mentioned Hart Crane earlier, and “Touched By This Water,” which I quote in full, is very much in his spirit:

Touched by this water
Water as inevitable as
the hand of bone
as endless as the burlap bag
around the reaching winter fingers
as brave as the ferns
in the painted lips
of the rotting mask
This water that touched
and will touch
the echo in each minute
that dropped from
the stringy paws of the sea turtle
This water that has flowed
through the sadness of the centuries
soured the wheat sacks
in dead cities
and arose an angel
with a body of air
that became
a tree with golden leaves

          Visionary and expansive, this is Locke at his best. Crane was the last poet who was able to fully capture and express the exalted in poetry, before the inevitable disillusionment that the First World War brought to the arts, before Elliot’s brilliant but diminished and bitter vision defined modernism. But Locke comes as close as anyone now writing to pulling it off.

          While most of Locke’s poems are one or two pages in length, a few are substantially longer. “On a Cliff in Maine and Elsewhere” is the longest, at forty pages. The line breaks and disjointed left margins of the poem break up what would otherwise be a straightforward narrative flow, mirroring the environmental destruction addressed in the poem, and the unraveling of political and social institutions that gave the times such a chaotic, even apocalyptic feel. Take this excerpt from section 16:

Bulldozers murdering
                                   trees
                                              and all
the animals, birds, insects
                                           that
live with these trees
                                   to bring
more money.
One of the few bears
                                   still living

in the Georgia forest
                                   murdered
and placed
                   on a doorstep
                                           as a
warning.

And this one from section 19:

The earth is
the quail finches’
the rattlesnakes’
the sharks’
the grasshoppers’
the bobcats’
the scrub oaks’
the sandspurs’
                        dominion.

Man the intruder, the
unwanted.

And another, from section 20.

     How can one
     ever atone
     for being born
     a human being”

          There is a strain of misanthropy in some of Locke’s work. But unlike Robinson Jeffers, whose misanthropy usually comes across as grand and noble, making humans small but not undignified, Locke’s misanthropy can be whiny and defeatist. He is simply not at his best at these times. Where he truly shines is in poems such as the above “Touched By This Water” and the final poem in the book, “Foam On Gulf Shore,” another long poem in several parts, and an excellent example of the visionary quality of his work:

1. A Glimpse and Premonition

…Foam
momentary wind-shaped water
sea born girl
coral colored hair
body of illumination…

among the gold berries
that are the seas’ fires
among the broken fishing lines of drunks
the melancholy corks that never wanted to float
the lead that never wanted to leave the mountain…

My past has been a card game
played by people who scribbled in chalk
their names on the sidewalk
My rearview mirror wants to forget
what it has passed

Foam
wind-shaped girl
I confront you
and write us
The geometry of your body
my loneliness
The wind makes you irregular
my birth
Your eyes change color
my rapture…

I am the poet who specializes
in loving things
snails spiders mud pelicans pine cones
bark feathers fur and the armadillo’s hide
No one could love you
as deeply as I do
but I know so well
the trap of the wind
this prison without walls
bars or a locked door
only an open shore and vast sky
The wind always blows

I now speak words
whose deeper sounds
are beyond my hearing
I say
I cannot destroy what little I have
this moment of foam
by trying to have more
the whole earth and its hair
I will remain on this shore
where hair fingers legs are born
as long as the wind
will allow you to stay
and write us into a poem

          This is one of the finest statements of love for the world that I’ve read in a long time.

          The First Decade is well worth having on your poetry shelf. It is a handsome book, sturdy, and nicely printed. The cover art is a beautiful reproduction of Locke’s own artwork. It is a book I know I will go back to time and time again.