open thy effing ears (please) by Gerald Locklin, and: long story short by Mark Weber, and: New Orleans, Chicago, and Points Elsewhere by Gerald Locklin (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s Buell. The book is engaging, informative, masterfully researched, and artisti­ cally crafted. It promises to be important to a broad audience of scholars, artists, and anyone interested in how culture is constructed in relationship to place as well as how a place can be re-envisioned to suit the needs of the culture. open thy effing ears (please). By Gerald Locklin. Long Beach, CA: Zerx Press, 2006. 20 pages, $5.00. long story short. By Mark Weber. Long Beach, CA: Zerx Press, 2006. 18 pages, $5.00. New Orleans, Chicago, and Points Elsewhere. By Gerald Locklin. Garden Grove, CA: R)V Press, 2006. 94 pages, $11.95. Reviewed by Jacoba Mendelkow Utah State University, Logan Let me be honest. I don’t like jazz. I don’t normally listen to it, and when I do, I get lost and confused. Maybe this is because I am too young to know what jazz is all about, maybe this is because I grew up listening to nothing but country and western music and, in so doing, missed the musical revolution of my gen­ eration. I missed the Grunge movement— I missed it because I was listening to Garth Brooks. Gerald Locklin did not miss the musical revolutions of his generation and celebrates the Jazz Age (and his youth) in open thy effing ears (please), an interesting collection of poetry aptly subtitled “Jazz Poems 2006.” Regardless of my own personal ignorance of jazz and the major jazz players, this collection was enjoyable and easy to read. No stuffy poems here, no need for extensive footnotes. Locklin uses jazz as a vehicle to move his conscious­ ness from listening in the now to remembering in the past. More than a col­ lection about jazz, this is a collection about memory and the making of future memories. Locklin writes of Clifford Brown, a jazz musician who died at age 26, of Richie Powell, whom he refuses to let “appear in any parentheses,” and of the narrator’s own “decent speaking voice” that “used to be better / Before the susurrus,” his “reduced lung capacity / From pulmonary embolisms years ago.” Jazz allows Locklin to get to the meat of his memories and the guts of the story, more than it is the story itself. long story short by Mark Weber is included in the chapbook with Locklin’s open thy effing ears (please). It worried me that their poems would not fit together, that, after having read Locklin’s poetry and flipping the book over to read from the back (like a “choose your own adventure” novel from my child­ hood), I would be ripped from the music of Locklin’s verse and have to adjust to the voice of a separate poet. It is not so. Weber’s collection of poetry seamlessly fits with Locklin’s—the collections are well paired. For Weber it is not jazz music that gets him into a place of remembrance where he can tell the stories of his youth but a nearly organic bleeding of thoughts, moving from untitled W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 8 poem to untitled poem, carrying through each a memory and a song. Weber asks us to “remember back in / the old days” and question “whatever happen’d to us? / we used to be so young, and / innocent, vibrant / and / alive.” And he is right and good to remember and to write it all down. Locklin’s other collection reviewed here, New Orleans, Chicago, and Points Elsewhere, is a different kind of collection than open they effing ears (please). While still focused on jazz, “because jazz has become not an obsession but / at least a major locus of study and pleasure in / my life,” the collection is filled with references to other arts—including literature and Ernest Hemingway and a large section inspired by a visit to Chicago and the Art Institute. These travel poems, like those included in effing ears, are remembered visits to other lands: “ten years ago...