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Tributes include a poem on the Rattle website by Long Beach State professor-writer Clint Margrave, “Toad Dies and Goes to Heaven.” Mimicking his ex-teacher’s style, he begins: “Nobody is more surprised than he is. / First of all, Toad doesn’t believe in heaven, / and secondly, even if he did, / he never expected to visit.” Finally, Locklin meets up with Bukowski, and they drink — “not to their health, but ours.”

When the pandemic ebbs enough to allow, Locklin’s family will gather to scatter his ashes at sea, somewhere off the coast of Long Beach.

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In Locklin’s doctoral thesis on Nathanael West, another renegade California transplant, he noted the novelist’s fate as a literary “enigma,” which he cited for “the failure of his work to take its rightful place in the history of American literature.”

Six decades later, Locklin’s own work might be cast in a similar light. For all his influence, his lasting significance in American poetry is unsettled. His body of work is daunting in size, and some of his best books are out of print. Absent a well-curated, career-spanning volume of selected poems, his achievements may go underrecognized.

But for the many he guided and taught, Locklin’s legacy is beyond dispute.

“I owe him a debt which is really not repayable. My whole life would’ve been different except for Gerry Locklin’s influence.” — Charles Webb

“He’s the one who turned me into a poet, not the other way around. … He’s woven literally through the fabric of my life.” — Ron Koertge

“I’m thankful that he just reached out his hand and he said, ‘You know, it’s not crowded at the top. C’mon, it’s only crowded at the bottom.’ Any success I have, I blame it on Gerry.” — Alexis Rhone Fancher, poet-photographer

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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