Patricia Lockwood made a splash online when her poem “Rape Joke” went viral in 2013 after it published on The Awl. It was included in Best American Poetry 2014 and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Lockwood’s new book is "Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals." It’s her second book after 2012’s Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, though you likely know her from twitter.
Her poems are different from her tweets, though. They’re longer, more complex, moving sometimes from absurdity to tragedy to humor to commentary in whiplash fashion. They’re also noted for their sexuality. In poems like “The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer” or “Revealing Nature Photographs” Lockwood plays with gender, sex, desire and cultural norms. I called them “androgynous” but that’s not right. The work is about desire and sex and longing but it’s not about a gender or identity, but can be exciting but also confusing for some. There are poems like “Tit Pics” which involves Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson–probably not in a way you imagined.
This sense of a lack of boundaries, a willingness to push aside accepted ideas and find a different approach to writing and thinking is what’s most interesting about Lockwood. She’s incredibly intelligent, funny, with a love of wordplay. I spoke with her recently and we had a far-ranging and hilarious conversation which covered the gamut from travel woes to wordplay to the influence of George Saunders on her work.
ALEX DUEBEN: I love your poems, but the titles don’t often match and often sound irreverent or something that could be dismissed easily but when you read the poems, they’re very interested in people.
PATRICIA LOCKWOOD: That’s true. I don’t think that the title are necessarily representative of the poems. I do like for the title itself to be an art form of sorts that stands on its own. My titles tend to be a little bit funnier, a little longer and more circuitous so then sometimes when people get to the actual poem they’re surprised that they’re not as completely irreverent and that there’s a serious trajectory to them. I think that that’s true.
AD: The book’s title Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals certainly does that.
PL: I just decide on titles and I cannot be dissuaded. I’m like, this is what this book is called. No one’s going to sell me on another. But then I just put anything in it that I want to. I think that the titles come out of a slightly different sensibility and I don’t think that people try to dismiss my poems on the basis on them being hipster-ish or whatever. They don’t really fit into that category, which is nice because you would think it would be a fallback term for people who see that someone is on the internet and occasionally writes the word vagina in a poem. “I know what that is–that’s a hipster!” But people have been pretty good about not doing that.
AD: Part of that, I think, is the huge empathy for the characters in your poems.
PL: Yes and I’m not really sure where that comes from. A lot of times I’m pouring empathy into the most unlikely characters or I start with a character that should be a cardboard cut out or shouldn’t be like relateable or humanize-able–I don’t know if that’s a word–in any way and then I go to great lengths to humanize it. I’m not really sure where that instinct comes from.
AD: Many of your poems reminded me of George Saunders’ stories. He has this habit of taking situations that appear comic and outlandish and using that as a starting point to explore people.
PL: You’re right! And then they turn very dark or very much relating to the human condition in the most fundamental way. That’s probably a good parallel. George Saunders was a huge influence on me. He continues to be but Pastoralia and Civilwarland in Bad Decline were huge huge books for me. There was a time when I read probably more short stories and I read so much of that in a formative way. I think that you might be right. There are setups which are similar. This sense in which the stories begin on comic premises and then move towards emotional exercises or something else.
AD: People often remark on the sexuality in your poems. I don’t want to say that it’s not what we expect of sex–because that doesn’t sound right–but there’s two interesting aspects. One is that you have sexuality in odd places like someone marrying a stuffed owl or the obsessions of a hornet mascot. And then I wouldn’t call it androgynous but there’s not a gendered point of view. There’s desire, sex, longing but it’s...
PL: At large in the world. You’re right, it’s not exactly androgyny. In this book I made a conscious decision to assign pronouns. I mean desire is at large in this book but it’s just filling these forms. It’s a sort of pervasive fog and it’s slipping into and out of different bodies at random and so if you’re working off that sort of a premise obviously gender isn’t going to matter–it’s just going to hit whoever it hits. So I thought that could a place to start from for this book and I do think I have as many male protagonists as I do female. It really I should have randomized to the greatest degree possible.
AD: I know there’s been talk about how do men read the poems and blah blah blah, but I can’t help but think that’s what bothers these critics.
PL: I think you’re absolutely right. It’s unsettling. And with something like “Tits Pics” I was really thinking about the tit as a form. This is going to get funny. I was thinking about secondary sexual characteristics as being forms that could lay on anyone like a butterfly. So you have tit as an idea at large in the universe and it lands on someone and it doesn’t matter if that someone is male or female.
AD: Reading the first poem, there’s both “he or she” and gender uncertainty and strangeness is there in the title but even more in the poem.
PL: Yeah I am sort of setting out a thesis in the first poem. I’m putting it out for you guys to look at.
AD: That idea of a character declaring themselves as a “homelandsexual” and what does it mean. There are a thousand ways to read that.
PL: Yeah or to just being your own distinct borderless country. On another level it’s just a base pun. [laughs] You are operating at more sublime levels, you hope, but there should be a basic horizon level that you’re operating on as well with language. Something that’s very close to the earth and you can get that with wordplay you can get that with puns as well.
AD: You seem to enjoy puns and wordplay
PL: I hate puns. My mother is a punster so I developed a pun deafness very early because you would all groan when she came in with a pun. But then later I was like, I’m not that great at making puns myself but I do have this instinct for wordplay. There are certain things that in comedy would be a straight up Catskills guy in a chicken beak one-liner, that in a poem can be elevated to something else. It’s a different meaning even though the words might be exactly the same.
Do they wear chicken beaks in the Catskills? [laughs]
AD: You have two poems, “The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer” and “Revealing Nature Photographs” which pair up well and get into what we’ve been talking about as far as sexuality in the poems.
PL: I always love to read those together. The interesting thing about those poems is that I sent those poems everywhere and no one would ever touch them. I got letters back saying, I would get fired if I published these. [laughs] They never appeared anywhere. They’re some of my favorite poems in the book but no one would touch them. Sometimes I’ll read them at readings and people will be like, is this funny? Sometimes they don’t know how to react and when you set them down sometimes you feel like they’re funny or more light-hearted than they are but then you get up and read them and you’re like, no, this is deadly serious. I had no idea. [laughs]
AD: So many of your poems are like that. The wordplay might make you laugh even though the subject is dark, but so much of it is absurd. There’s so much that confuses a simple reaction to them.
PL: I like to use whiplash a little bit in my treatment of the reader. It’s rougher than some people like. It does lend a really interesting element to readings where I’ll read a line that’s funny and it gets a laugh and then the next line people are like, what did you do? [laughs]
It’s not stand up poetry, which I think some people expect if they just know me from the internet or they know that in real life I’m a funny person. If you can say that about yourself. If you come to one of my readings you might expect something different than what you actually get.
AD: You are very active on twitter but your poems are different from your tweets.
PL: Absolutely. [laughs] People do ask that question, how is a tweet different from a poem. I’m like, have you read my tweets and read my poems? You’ll see.
AD: I would say the voice is consistent, though.
PL: That’s good to know because I do wonder about that. If I do operate in these dual registers–one of which is a funny register and completely irreverent, and then in this serious register as well–how do you transition from one to the other? I’ve thought about that a lot and it’s hard to tell with yourself whether you have a consistent voice or not.
AD: Your tweets tend to be humorous and your poems can be humorous but they’re more complex.
PL: Yes and there’s a very slight shift in vocabulary. Obviously I’m not going to write about the Hamburglar in a poem for the most part. Not to denigrate people who could write really great poems about the Hamburglar. That’s just not something I’m not interested in.
Pop culture lends itself well to tweets but I’m not as invested in the pop culture vocabulary in poetry. I think that there are people who really elevate that to an art form obviously. You have someone like Frank O’Hara but you read him and you have like a hundred footnotes to know what he’s talking about but that’s an art form that he’s raised it to. I don’t necessarily feel that calling so it’s not something that I do.
AD: There was a line in “Rape Joke” about asking for it to become what people remember and very pointed and often true line. By including that were you trying to ward off that from happening?
PL: It is partly superstitious. It’s an observation, but at the same time, you’re warding it off by writing it down. That line was also a necessity because it is true. This is the sort of thing that happens. It’s the sort of thing that happens when people talking about these sorts of things are not normalized. When someone tells you something like this it causes, for the most part, people to carry a different atmosphere about you in their minds because they know this particular thing. That works in literature as well. I mean someone can have a career of twenty books and if there was a particular personal piece of writing that tends to be what people remember.
AD: As part of that, I know you’re writing a memoir and there were funny instagrams announcing it.
PL: We did these funny photoshops to announce it. The working title is Priest Daddy. We’re probably going to change that because a bunch of people–including some editors I talked to–said it sounds like a Russian porn thing. [laughs] Maybe that’s good.
AD: As a poet or fiction writer you can use the elements of your life, but there’s a distance and memoir is something very different.
PL: Well, obviously I’m not going to write a conventional memoir. Anyone who thinks that is going to be insane and should go away because that’s not going to happen. [laughs] But it’s true. I never wrote about myself for a really long time but then you dip a toe in and you start to see it as a subject. I have a very weird family history and a very funny story to tell. You can remove your life from yourself and turn it into an art object in a couple of different ways. You can do it by using highly sculptured or lyrical language. That can be the distancing factor. Or it can be comedy. Or it can be both. My thinking was, let’s try both. I’m a highly lyrical writer. I also write comedy. Can I write a book about my life that uses those two things? Or brings them together into the same sphere. Will that work?
AD: Does it seem to be working?
PL: It does. It’s really, really exhilarating because you have this incredible field to work in. All of this space. Your sense of form in poetry is tight and you can see it expand to fill a larger space–equally so with comic parts and poetic things. There are things in the book as it currently stands that could easily go into a book of prose poetry. I think it’s going to be really good. Let’s not jinx it. [laughs] I have this electric feeling when I’m working on it that I’m really doing something, which is exciting.
AD: Do you often get that feeling when writing?
PL: Yeah but a poem is a shorter space so you’re not having it sustained over a period of a year or two or three years where you get up and work at the same project. You don’t have that with a poem. There’s something very satisfying too about the dailyness of it. I have to get up and carve out these hours to work on something that seems much more tangible because it’s longer.
AD: So what else do you want to do?
PL: In my life? [laughs]
AD: Yes, you finished a book so what’s your life plan? [laughs]
PL: Here’s the interesting thing about me: I have no sense of time or temporality whatsoever. I might as well be a fetus floating in a clock thinking that the ticking is my heartbeat because I have no idea. [laughs] The other night I asked a friend when her birthday was and said June 1. I said, so it’s coming up? [laughs]
I’m one of those little moles snuffling through the earth, maybe an inch visible in front of my eyes–I don’t know how moles work so don’t quote me on it–and I’m aware of nothing else beyond that. I’ll bump up against a little potato in the ground and that’s the potato of an idea and I’m like, that’s what I’ll be working with now. I don’t think moles eat potatoes, but they must run across them at some point. Maybe that’s why it’s so rare to get an idea?
AD: So the lesson people should take away is: be the mole.
PL: Be the mole. That’s a very pornographic lesson. I think it’s perfect. [laughs]