“The Poet Laureate Of Twitter”

Sext: The subway shoots like a load through the earth, full of tiny, terrible personalities all trying to be born—
Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood) March 29, 2014

Sext: I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me—
Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood) August 09, 2011

Sext: I am a Dan Brown novel and you do me in my plot-hole. "Wow," I yell in ecstasy, "this makes no sense at all"—
Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood) January 08, 2013

That’s the title Adam Plunkett bestows upon Patricia Lockwood:

Lockwood is famous—more than thirty thousand people follow her on Twitter—but the source of her fame is almost entirely owing to her tweets and not to her poetry. Even the exception, her most famous poem, “Rape Joke,” could read as a series of exceptional tweets. She’s made for the medium. It rewards her particular talents for compression, provocation, mockery, snark.

Her ongoing series of “Sexts,” an extended parody of sexual text messages, is disarming as well as unsettling, because it moves quickly between the dumb voice that Lockwood captures so well and something entirely different—something hectoring, obscene, and sinister.

“‘I’m so wet,’ you murmur. Marmaduke raises his glistening face. ‘That’s because I’m famous for drool,’ he laughs.” “I go up to heaven and open God’s Bible. It contains only a single sext: ‘Im hard.’” … Just as there are always followers to laugh along with her, there are always men who miss the joke. She has said, “It is so funny, still, when a man—and it’s usually a man—responds to you, going, ‘Yeah girl, I want to put soap on your boobies in the shower.’ You’re responding literally to a tweet about me riding down the neck of a brontosaurus until I come.”

Jesse Lichtenstein profiles (NYT) Lockwood, whose newest collection of poetry, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, was published this week:

“Whenever anyone asks me about process,” she said, “I’m like a cat stroked the wrong way: Get away from my belly!” But she is fundamentally a sharer, a poet for the age of sharing. “I’m verbally incontinent — anything just pours out of me,” she said. “My father’s that way. He doesn’t worry about it. My mother does. I got both. I say just the worst things the English language is capable of, and then later on I lie awake at night thinking, Oh, Tricia, you’ve done it again.”

Lockwood’s poems are most radical in their ability to convey the essential strangeness of sex and gender. “I consistently felt myself to be not male or female,” she said, “but the 11-year-old gender: protagonist. Maybe it’s a byproduct of reading a lot of books, of projecting yourself into different bodies. As an early teen, I thought I presented as androgynous, which was not true. But I had a short haircut, and I felt androgynous.”