He taught at CSU, Long Beach from 1965 to 2007 and is also a part-time lecturer in the University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing Program. He was a friend of Charles Bukowski, whom he first met in 1970, when he arranged for Bukowski to give a reading at CSU, Long Beach. Whereas Bukowski was an avatar of the "Meat School" of poetry that flourished in the 1960s and '70s, Locklin was considered a "Stand-Up" poet. According to Locklin, Charles Harper Webb defined "Stand-Up" poets as having "the qualities of directness, humor, pathos, performability, accessibility, [and] manliness...."