By John Penner
FROM: Los Angeles Times

A Cal State Long Beach classroom, 1985 or so. Gerald Locklin looks every bit his nickname “Bear,” with bushy salt-and-pepper hair and beard, thick glasses, rumpled polo shirt, jeans and Birkenstocks with socks. He leans heavily on the lectern, and opens class the way he always did, asking in his Rochester accent, “What’s haaappening?”

A conversation would commence. See any good movies? Concerts? How about that Lakers game? It would segue into talk about the stories students were writing. Maybe a Locklin lecture, covering a sweep ofliterary history from Beowulf to Barthelme, to give context to a new work being studied, in a discussion that was scholarly and fascinating and fun. All in 50 minutes.

As English professor, writer, editorand literary ambassador, Locklin helped transform the campus where he taught for 42 years into a place for writers and Long Beach into one of the country’s poetry hubs.

He was one of the more important and prolific American poets of the last half-century, whose companionable approach to the mundane and the consequential mirrored his classroom style. Read Rest of Article Here