Professor Emeritus of the Humanities, was Poet in Residence at the University of Tampa for over 20 years.
Has had over 5,000 poems published. As of August, 2006 5,694 poems published.
Over 2,000 were published in print magazines, such as American Poetry Review, Nation, and Bitter Oleander. In September 1999, he became a cyber poet, added over 3,000 poems published in E zines.
Is the author of 14 print books of poetry, and in 2002, added 3 E books,
The Squids Dark Ink, From a Tiny Room, and The Death of Daphne.
The entire Spring 2004 issue of the magazine Bitter Oleander is
devoted to a 92 page interview with Duane Locke and will include sixty of his poems.
In August 2004, e book, 45 poems, Observations, from Poetic Inhalation.
In August 2004, feature poet in Adagio Poetry Quarterl.
In December 2005, a 28 page interview in Penhimalaya, plus many poems.
His work is included among the neglected poets, such as H.D., Amy Lowell, Weldon Kees,
In Dan Schneider�s renown Cosmoetica.
He is also a painter, having many exhibitions, such as at the city art museum in Gainesville, Florida. A recent book, Extraordinary Interpretations by Gary Monroe, published by University of Florida Press,
Has a discussion of Duane Locke�s paintings. His work is currently on exhibition at the Polk Museum of Art, and will be added to the permanent collection.
Also, a photographer, now has over 278 photos in e zines. He does close-ups of trash tossed away in alleys and on sidewalks. Now, he has completed a series called �mystic vegetation.� and �The Goddess Inanna.� He is currently doing what he calls Surphotography, and photographing nature, birds, insects,
Etc.
He is listed in Who�s Who in America, 2006 (Marquis.)
His old biographical notes, published many time, are now obsolete. The notes stated that he lived in an old decaying house in the sunny Tampa slums, populated largely by drug dealers and the homeless.
The house was condemned by the city of Tampa inspectors, what he calls the �Tampa Gestapo�, and after his living at this location for fifty years, he was forced to leave within six days.
The forced move was due to the fall of the bungalow in his large back yard.
The bungalow contained a priceless literary scholarly library which is now under debris. An army of inspectors descended and decided he could no longer live in his home, so Duane Locke left Tampa to relocate in Lakeland, Florida. He lives by a lake abundant with wild life. The fall was a �Fortunate Fall,� for he now lives in a more desirable and pleasant location. The only disadvantage is that he can find no trash to photograph, no broken beer bottles on sidewalk, no litter as it was in Tampa.
For more information on Duane Locke, click on Duane Locke on Google, There are about a half-million entries under his name.
On MSN, only 60,000 entries.
Poetry is not copying,
What poetry presents was never present to be copied.
Poetry shoves forth
What was not
And what becomes what is,
What was, and what still is,
And what will still be
In future archives and in a timelessness.
Poetry is not understandable, understandable
In the sense
Of being understood as a full, totalizing,
Rational, logical accounting
By some unifying hermeuntical interpretation.
In poetry
What was there
Becomes transmogrified into what is there,
And will be there afterwards
As the empty space atop a winter cypress
Where an osprey temporarily perched
And transformed the space above the cypress
Forever.
What is there waits buried
To be reborn,
Waits to become a birth,
Never to die,
But to be reburied
And to be born again.
Every birth
With a different birth cry,
Every birth
A new sound brought onto the earth.
Poetry brings into being buried being
That is becoming,
And neither being or becoming.
Life is birth, copulation, death.
Poetry is birth, copulation, birth.
Poetry is an occurrence
As an overture to occurrences,
As occult
As an anhinga�s spread wings
As occult
As the osculations
Of silver-finned small fish.
No man-made world,
No society to constitute the cowardly consciousness,
Nothing,
Nothing else
When intensities coagulate into multiplies,
When the clicking sounds
In the Limpkin�s music
Because fused with the melody
Or miracle
Of the Limpkin.
Or as when, we two
Overcome the ruses
That people have made
To ruin the short lives
That individuals have
In this heaven that the earth
Could be if the ruses
Were not resurrected,
When we leave the main highways
And the alternate detours,
Both having been paved
With the language of lies
That the people speak,
Travel in a space
That has never been recognized to exist,
But has always
Existed within us.
Chronometric techniques,
Clocks, calendars become obsolete.
Numbers become pretty myths,
Have horns of twists like unicorns.
Caesuras become Caesars
In the uncalculated course
Of the flow where there are no rivers;
The celestial found
In the obscurity of the terrestrial,
The monadic becomes nomadic,
Access without access to the sacred afflatus.
The flower of a billion years ago
Is the flower we find and hold
For it to become a flower
Of a billion years from now
As prehistory, post history, future history
Fused into the thingness
Emanating from the thing
And giving us a presence
In the coming and going of presences.
I must confess
That I do not think
Love is understandable.
Thus every tepid, trivial, and false
Relationship can be deemed,
Designated as love because
Love is not understandable.
Most people who think
They are in love
Are not in love at all.
Most are biological driven,
Or socially enslaved to seek marriage,
Or most who believe they love
Are cowards who are lickspittles
To whatever is socially constituted.
Most everything written about love
Is terrorist, coercing people, to join
With others in the destruction of values.
So most everything written about love
Is socially enslaved fiction or nonsense.
I suppose the same could be said about
All human beliefs, for what human beings
Believe is fiction or nonsense. There are
Some exceptions, Dadaists and Post-Modernists.
There was one philosopher who spoke
The truth, Gorgias. Rarely has anyone
Spoken the truth since Gorgias.
Yes, love is not understandable.
You, whom I love, thought you
Understood love, and destroyed our love.
All I have to say is that I
Declare you guilty of murdering love.
I know that all legal system have gone awry,
But still I declare you,
Guilty of murdering love.
Much to my surprise, our legal system
Found you guilty of murdering love,
But the legal system, the jury,
Also declared:
That I must serve your sentence.
What has been declared for decades
A human being can,
Even if the human being danced
With an uptossed skirt the Can Can,
Be taken for granted.
Not even General Grant can be taken for granted.
Facticity is under suspicion, Facticity
Is suspected of being a crime against humanity.
History of the past
Is written in the present,
Thus there is only the present
And no past.
The past is an interpretation,
Thus a fiction.
There is even an infinite undesirability
About the cognomen
Of Uncle Sam�s brother.
Everything is radically unstable.
Was it Toby, Toddy, or Doddy?
His sister, was said to be without criteria,
Foundation, finality
Except when in the vicinity of the Sistine Chapel.
Words are what Humpty Dumpty
Choose the words to mean.
Jack and Jill decided to ditch
Logic, epistemology, rationality,
And fall down a hill
At five o�clock in the afternoon.
Now in the annals it is stated
That a woman, John Underhill�s wife,
Wore seawater green silk hose
Which she removed when with Fludd.
After the adultery, she is recorded
As saying, �Heere now I drink
To thee, Fludd.�
Now, this account of joie de vivre,
Requited and fulfilled love
Might have been history, facticity,
Or it might have a narrative, fiction,
Something
Constructed
To satisfy a human daydream.
I have lived a long life.
But completely unsatisfactory answers
Have been given to all my questions.
I recently fell in love with a great grandmother.
It was love
At first sight,
Blind Cupid shoot an arrow in my eye.
My first sight of her
Was her on roller blades.
She was roller blading the three mile journey
On the sidewalk around Lake Hollingsworth
In the city of which I am a citizen, Lakeland.
I became faint
With intense passion
When I saw her coast.
But I must confess like Augustine,
Rouseau, and all the rest,
That I do not understand
Our consequential love relationship.
I�ll never understand
This bonding or bondage.
Once I understood when an adolescent
The difference between the sublunary
And the superlunary regions, but since
The cosmonauts I understand neither.
During moments of insight, temporarily
I see our relationship as being acolytic.
I am an altar boy, really an altar old man,
To her altar, as I imagine her to be a goddess,
I dream she is a goddess like Innana,
Who cared for a tree with her hand,
The huluppu tree where Anzu bird nested,
A goddess proud of her vulva in which she rejoiced.
I was an acolyte to this great-grandmother.
But upon farther insight I saw
Our relationship was not acolytic,
But alcoholic, our sips of cognac,
The more cognac, the more intense our passions.
My passion reached its apogee
When we drunk a bottle of Crimean cognac.