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Hemingway Colloquium: The Poet Goes To Cuba
49 Poems, two short stories and one disquisition with several photographs by the author, Gerald Locklin. 54 pages with endsheet reproductions from the author's handwritten manuscript, plus two full-color and two monochrome reproductions of photographs by the author; full-color dust jacket over duplex cover; and other niceties. Printed, hand assembled and bound in the U.S. Very limited first edition.
- GenresPoetry
54 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1999
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September 6, 2015
I read Gerald Locklin’s Hemingway Colloquium when it first appeared near the turn of the millennium. I went through it much too rapidly and made a mental note at the time to revisit it soon. But alas I didn’t do so until its recent reissue in this unabridged Audible version read peerlessly by the author himself.
Perhaps what struck me the most strongly this time was the balanced and unadorned beauty of the poetry, and I was reminded more than once of Jonson’s description of “Marlowe’s mighty line.” Locklin is a lover of virtually all types of music, most particularly jazz; and there is a musical, polyphonic quality to his verse that is easy to miss if one skims through it as I had some fifteen years before. The motion of the narrative shifts from the formally periodic to the baldly declamatory to the thuddingly raucous--from comic asides to general observations to outright pathos--in a quicksilver manner so adroit that the skill involved is deceptively unapparent.
I won’t take the reader through the narrative—that job is best performed by Locklin himself—but it predictably covers all matters, great and small (not excluding those gastronomic and excretory), involved in his trip to late-nineties Cuba. There’s the obligatory drama with the hotel maid (happily resolved, in this instance) and the even more obligatory encounters with a series of stupid and distasteful academics, foreign and domestic. And of particular note is a poignant account of an impoverished guide who brings her small daughter along so she can partake of the free lunches scorned by the well-fed professors participating in the colloquium.
Perhaps the key to this remarkable book can be found in the statement made early on: “Travel intensifies my emotions, and I trust the instincts of ordinary people beyond the theories and arrogance of academia.” For in the final analysis, the true subject is not the author or even Papa Hemingway himself, but the beautiful island and people of Cuba, which, in widely diverse ways, brought such inspiration to them both.
Perhaps what struck me the most strongly this time was the balanced and unadorned beauty of the poetry, and I was reminded more than once of Jonson’s description of “Marlowe’s mighty line.” Locklin is a lover of virtually all types of music, most particularly jazz; and there is a musical, polyphonic quality to his verse that is easy to miss if one skims through it as I had some fifteen years before. The motion of the narrative shifts from the formally periodic to the baldly declamatory to the thuddingly raucous--from comic asides to general observations to outright pathos--in a quicksilver manner so adroit that the skill involved is deceptively unapparent.
I won’t take the reader through the narrative—that job is best performed by Locklin himself—but it predictably covers all matters, great and small (not excluding those gastronomic and excretory), involved in his trip to late-nineties Cuba. There’s the obligatory drama with the hotel maid (happily resolved, in this instance) and the even more obligatory encounters with a series of stupid and distasteful academics, foreign and domestic. And of particular note is a poignant account of an impoverished guide who brings her small daughter along so she can partake of the free lunches scorned by the well-fed professors participating in the colloquium.
Perhaps the key to this remarkable book can be found in the statement made early on: “Travel intensifies my emotions, and I trust the instincts of ordinary people beyond the theories and arrogance of academia.” For in the final analysis, the true subject is not the author or even Papa Hemingway himself, but the beautiful island and people of Cuba, which, in widely diverse ways, brought such inspiration to them both.
Displaying 1 of 1 review