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Patricia Lockwood Is Figuring It Out as She Goes

The viral poet and Booker judge talks her new book, finding inspiration in group chats, and not knowing how to cross the street

I have spent a not insignificant amount of time drafting a lede for my conversation with Patricia Lockwood, the writer whom The New Yorker described as having the “impish verve and provocative guilelessness of a peeing cupid.” Lockwood’s work spans forms but invariably ignites the internet: she is famous for tweets like, “I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me”; her improbably viral poem “Rape Joke”; critical essays about, among other subjects, meeting the pope; books like Priestdaddy in which she must return home to live at her parents’ rectory. After suffering from long COVID, which included debilitating migraines, and four years after her husband nearly died after hemorrhaging due to a bowel blockage, Lockwood is now largely on the other side of illness and out with her third book of poetry, Agate Head / Stone Soup. Two poems from the collection, “Art Chat” and “Low Rating,” along with a third poem of Lockwood’s, “Big Christ,” have been reprinted below. When Lockwood joins the Google Meet from her home in Savannah, Georgia, having just returned from deliberations for the Booker Prize, for which she is a juror, she obliterates my lede before her screen has even totally come into focus.

Patricia Lockwood: This platform has chosen to emphasize and distort my rack. There’s a huge hanging naturals illusion. I want this to be in the lede. They don’t really look like this.

Ariella Garmaise: I can’t see! I feel so devastated.

If only they were all the way out and down there. I’d be living a different life if those were the real ones. This is apparently how it’s going to be, and there’s nothing we can do. Hello! How are you?

It’s lovely to meet you finally. How are you doing? You’re judging the Booker Prize right now, how has that been?

Oh yes, and I almost died, but we just had the longlist meeting, where I very energetically defended my weird selections. We put together the longlist of thirteen books, and then, after that, immediately I was like, “Oh, what am I supposed to be reading now? What am I even supposed to be doing with my life?” Because it is so all-consuming. If everyone knew what an extreme process it is, I don’t know that they would ever do it. But the lady in charge of the Booker is a hypnotist, and that’s how she gets people to agree.

Did she really sit you down and hypnotize you?

Her eyes literally did swirl in her face. It was like Kaa in The Jungle Book. But really, the reason I said yes is because Jason, my husband, said he’d read all the books with me. He hasn’t really been able to read books for the last ten years, ever since he got his cataract surgery, because it wasn’t as comfortable for him to read. So I was like, “Okay, challenge accepted. Now you’re going to read 163 books.” And he did read most of them!

The fact that Jason read the books with you is really interesting, because I had such a funny experience emailing you, which was that I never knew who would respond—you or Jason. Sometimes you would switch off, and I would think I was talking to you, but it was really Jason.

If the email sounds like it was from a murderer, it was Jason. I had to explain to him that you have to sound friendly if you are a woman emailing people, but then he started including all of these exclamation points, which sounded completely deranged, and I had to tell him to stop that too.

I’d read the New Yorker profile of you, and I was always struck by the detail that you guys ride a tandem bike together around Savannah. That’s how it felt to email you, like a joint consciousness.

It is. We are such celebrities because I’m literally strapped in like a baby in the back. I can’t even explain to you how ignominious the stuff is. Babies, dogs—everyone is so excited to see us. And when you’re on the back of it, you’re sort of processing visually and sensorily; breezes or winds are passing through you, and I would often get ideas from the sound of the rhythm of the wheels, especially since, I must clarify, I was not doing anything.

You’re not pedalling?

No, I’m not pedalling. I’m not doing anything.

So it’s not really a tandem bike.

No; it’s a bicycle built for two with a baby seat in the back, and I’m just carried along.

That got through The New........

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