Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Priestdaddy
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 4/27/1982
WEBSITE:
CITY: Savannah
STATE: GA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/patricia-lockwood * https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/patricia-lockwoods-crowd-pleasing-poetry * http://www.vulture.com/2017/04/review-of-priestdaddy-patricia-lockwoods-new-memoir.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2013090243 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2013090243 |
| HEADING: | Lockwood, Patricia |
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| 001 | 9343124 |
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| 053 | _0 |a PS3612.O27 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Lockwood, Patricia |
| 370 | __ |a Fort Wayne (Ind.) |e Lawrence (Kan.) |
| 375 | __ |a female |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 378 | __ |q Patricia Anne |
| 670 | __ |a Balloon pop outlaw black, c2012 : |b title page (Patricia Lockwood) |
| 670 | __ |a Motherland, fatherland, hoMelandsexuals, 2014: |b ECIP t.p. (Patricia Lockwood) data view (b. in Ft. Wayne, Indiana; her debut poem collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, was released in 2012 by Octopus Books; her poems have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Tin House, and Poetry) |
| 670 | __ |a New York times magazine, 28 May 2014: |b The smutty-metaphor queen of Lawrence, Kansas (Patricia Lockwood; born Fort Wayne, Indiana; resides in Lawrence, Kansas) |u http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/magazine/the-smutty-metaphor-queen-of-lawrence-kansas.html?action=click&module=Search®ion=searchResults&mabReward=relbias%3Ar&url=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fsearch%2Fsitesearch%2F%3Faction%3Dclick%26region%3DMasthead%26pgtype%3DHomepage%26module%3DSearchSubmit%26contentCollection%3DHomepage%26t%3Dqry998%23%2Fpatricia%2520lockwood&_r=0 |
| 670 | __ |a Wikipedia, 2 June 2014: |b Patricia Lockwood entry (Patricia Lockwood is an American poet and comedian. She has published two books of poetry and is notable for her trans-genre poetics, including her series of Twitter “sexts” and the prose poem “Rape Joke.”) (Patricia Anne Lockwood; born 27 April 1982) |u http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Lockwood |
PERSONAL
Born April 27, 1982, in Fort Wayne, IN; daughter of Greg and Karen Lockwood; married Jason Kendell.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet and author.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Poetry, Tin House, London Review of Books, New Republic, New Yorker, and New York Times.
SIDELIGHTS
Patricia Lockwood achieved notoriety with her poetry career through the online release of “Rape Joke,” a poem that encourages readers to evaluate their views on rape and how the subject is treated by society while also recounting one of the most painful periods of Lockwood’s life. However, Lockwood has also published more poetry in the form of several collections, her first being Balloon Pop Outlaw Black.
Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is Lockwood’s second poetry collection and also contains “Rape Joke.” As a whole, the collection is meant to challenge many aspects of society that most people do not give much consideration otherwise. One of the other poems featured in the book, “List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers,” serves as a profile of a soldier who served in the war in Iraq. Another poem, “Revealing Nature Photographs,” also broaches the subject of sexual assault but uses it as a larger metaphor for the harm humanity is inflicting upon the planet.
Antioch Review contributor Alex M. Frankel commented: “The ‘land’ of this poet’s mind is a garish, often perverted Disneyland with such hypnotic power that some visitors might not want to leave at all.” On the New Yorker website, Adam Plunkett felt that “[Lockwood] has a genius for writing in the language of vulgar misogyny as she speaks to its absurdity.” New York Times reviewer Stephen Burt remarked: “She has written a book at once angrier, and more fun, more attuned to our time and more bizarre, than most poetry can ever get, a book easy to recommend for people who do not read new poetry often—as well as for almost all the people who do.”
Michael Andor Brodeur, a writer on Boston Globe website, said: “Fans and followers of Lockwood’s Twitter account—and she’s racked up nearly 45,000 of them—will recognize her brand of delightfully bite-size, comic surrealism.” Slate contributor Jonathan Farmer wrote: “Lockwood’s poems are less a critique of that culture than an alternative opened up sideways to it, a place made of the mind’s freedom to move through it on its own outrageous, occasionally indifferent, improvisatory terms.” On the Cut website, Kat Stoeffel stated: “It is a fantastically weird little book that makes funny and creepy almost-fables out of sex and gender and the business of writing.” Fourth and Sycamore reviewer David Nilsen remarked: “Patricia Lockwood is a poet to watch, not only because she’s original and weird and very, very good, but because she’s fun.” Online at the American Microreviews and Interviews website, Brandon Amico said: “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is a lot of things.” He also wrote: “It is daring, musical, memorable, vivid, human, and often riotous.”
Priestdaddy is different from all of Lockwood’s other works in that it is not a gathering of poems but instead a memoir about her experiences following her return to the home in which she grew up. This period of her life was marked by a monetary slump between Lockwood and Lockwood’s spouse, who was unable to work after undergoing cataract surgery. However, being in her childhood home forced Lockwood to remember and reckon with an assortment of childhood memories regarding her parents and the way she was raised, as well as how their religious views and practices shaped her as a person.
Spectator reviewer Stuart Kelly remarked: “She has perfect comic timing, a righteous—even self-righteous—indignation and a knowledge of when these registers should be deployed.” He added: “It’s just good writing, and a profound capacity to be honest.” In an issue of BookPage, Kelly Blewett wrote: “This is a book that will transport the reader deep into Lockwood’s zany and appealing point of view.” One contributor to Kirkus Reviews called the book a “linguistically dexterous, eloquently satisfying narrative debut.” Kathy Sexton, writing in Booklist, said: “Lockwood … shows off her poet’s skills with lovely, metaphor-filled descriptions that make this memoir shine.” Vulture reviewer Christian Lorentzen commented: “‘Rape Joke’ also demonstrated her singular talent for transforming trauma into art as beautiful as it is painful, and doing so without compromising her incandescent wit.” He added: “That talent is on display throughout Priestdaddy.”
On the Rumpus website, Eliza Smith expressed that “Priestdaddy is a book necessary for 2017—a meditation on living in the house of an unabashed patriarch, of asserting one’s humanity and continuing to take up space.” Vox contributor Constance Grady remarked: “What emerges from Priestdaddy in the end is an immensely tender, loving, and melancholy portrait of a family, just as funny and dirty as the title suggests but with an unexpected heart.” She added: “It’s the best version of what you might hope for when you’re reading a memoir by the poet laureate of Twitter.” Katy Waldman, a writer on the Slate website, felt that Priestdaddy is “studded with breathtaking examples of what she can do when she allows her guard to fall.” Paste reviewer Bridey Heing wrote that Lockwood “proves to be a gifted narrator in chronicling her family’s outlandishness.” Laura Adamczyk, a contributor to the AV Club website, commented: “Even when not mashing up sex and religion, Lockwood’s metaphors are tactile and evocative, her poignant turns of phrase shining that much brighter for being placed within all the dick jokes and knocks to Catholic fanfare.” Online at Huffington Post, Claire Fallon recommended the book to “poetry buffs, former Catholic school kids and anyone who loves a well-executed memoir.”
Kansas City writer Anne Kniggendorf said: “What’s glorious in her writing has little to do with her father and everything to do with her fascinating mother and the way Lockwood’s relationship with her matures.” Dwight Garner, a writer on the New York Times website, remarked that “‘Priestdaddy‘ is consistently alive with feeling.” Gemma Sieff, also writing on the New York Times website, said: “What I loved about this book was the way it feels suffused with love—of literature, nature and the English language; for her family, those loved ones whom this book is for.” Chicago Tribune contributor Kathleen Rooney wrote: “‘Priestdaddy’ gives both believers and nonbelievers a great deal to contemplate.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Antioch Review, fall, 2014, Alex M. Frankel, review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, p. 803.
Booklist, April 1, 2017, Kathy Sexton, review of Priestdaddy: A Memoir, p. 13.
BookPage, May, 2017, Kelly Blewett, review of Priestdaddy, p. 23.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2017, review of Priestdaddy.
New Yorker, May 22, 2017, Laura Kolbe, review of Priestdaddy, p. 84.
Publishers Weekly, April 28, 2014, review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, p. 109.
Spectator, May 27, 2017, Stuart Kelly, “Homer Simpson in a Chasuble,” review of Priestdaddy, p. 52.
ONLINE
American Microreviews and Interviews, http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/ (February 20, 2018), Brandon Amico, review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.
AV Club, https://aux.avclub.com/ (May 1, 2017), Laura Adamczyk, “Perverted Poet Patricia Lockwood Runs Wild in the Memoir Priestdaddy,” review of Priestdaddy.
Book Globe, http://www.bookculture.com/ (June 8, 2017), “Q&A with “Priestdaddy” author, Patricia Lockwood,” author interview.
Boston Globe, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ (July 19, 2014), Michael Andor Brodeur, review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.
Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (May 1, 2017), Kathleen Rooney, “Patricia Lockwood’s Memoir, ‘Priestdaddy,’ Is Smart, Funny and Irreverent,” review of Priestdaddy.
Coil, https://medium.com/ (October 25, 2016), review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.
Cut, https://www.thecut.com/ (June 4, 2014), Kat Stoeffel, “Review: The ‘Rape Joke’ Poet Patricia Lockwood’s New Book Is Great,” review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.
Electric Lit, https://electricliterature.com/ (July 18, 2014), Hilary Lawlor, “Interview: Patricia Lockwood, Author of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” author interview.
Fourth and Sycamore, https://fourthandsycamore.com/ (February 2, 2015), David Nilsen, review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.
Guardian (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 27, 2017), Paul Laity, “Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood review—a Dazzling Comic Memoir,” review of Priestdaddy.
Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (May 1, 2017), Claire Fallon, “‘Priestdaddy’ Takes On Priesthood, Fatherhood and the Patriarchy,” review of Priestdaddy.
Kansas City, http://www.kansascity.com/ (May 13, 2017), Anne Kniggendorf, “Lawrence Poet Patricia Lockwood Is a Bonafide & Hilarious Memoirist in ‘Priestdaddy,’” review of Priestdaddy.
KQED Arts, https://ww2.kqed.org/ (May 7, 2017), Ingrid Rojas Contreras, “Patricia Lockwood on ‘Priestdaddy’ and the Secret Language of Family.”
London Review of Books, https://www.lrb.co.uk/ (July 13, 2017), Namara Smith, “Bible Study in the Basement,” review of Priestdaddy.
Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/ (April 28, 2017), Kate Tuttle, “Patricia Lockwood Likes to Write in Bed. ‘Priestdaddy‘ Is Her Memoir.”
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (July 18, 2014), Stephen Burt, “Picture Everyone Naked: Patricia Lockwood’s ‘Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,’” review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals; (May 3, 2017), Dwight Garner, “Patricia Lockwood Is a Priest’s Child (Really), but ‘From the Devil,’” review of Priestdaddy; (June 9, 2017), Gemma Sieff, “A Poet’s Loving Take on Her Unorthodox Catholic Family,” review of Priestdaddy.
New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/ (May 29, 2014), Adam Plunkett, “Patricia Lockwood’s Crowd-Pleasing Poetry,” review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.
NPR Website, https://www.npr.org/ (May 10, 2017), Annalisa Quinn, “‘Priestdaddy‘ Shimmers with Wonderful, Obscene Life,” review of Priestdaddy.
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (May 4, 2017), Bridey Heing, “The Good, the Bad and the Hilariously Filthy: Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood,” review of Priestdaddy.
Poetry Foundation Website, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (February 20, 2018), author profile.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (April 24, 2013), Josh Cook, review of Balloon Pop Outlaw Black; (October 29, 2014), Kent Shaw, review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals; (April 25, 2017), Eliza Smith, “Only Patricia Lockwood Could Get Away with Priestdaddy,” review of Priestdaddy.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (June 2, 2014), Jonathan Farmer, “Steak-Umm out of Sacred Cows,” review of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals; (May 31, 2017), Katy Waldman, “Bless Me Father,” review of Priestdaddy.
Vox, https://www.vox.com/ (June 1, 2017), Constance Grady, “In Priestdaddy, the Writer behind “Rape Joke” Tells the Darkly Funny Story of Her Family,” review of Priestdaddy.
Vulture, http://www.vulture.com/ (April 25, 2017), Christian Lorentzen, “In Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood Goes Home to a House ‘Made for Screaming,’” review of Priestdaddy.
Biography
Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of a memoir, Priestdaddy, and two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a New York Times Notable Book. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The London Review of Books. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.
Patricia Lockwood’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Tin House, and Poetry. She is the author of a memoir, Priestdaddy (Riverhead Books, 2017), and two poetry collections. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.
In April 2014, Patricia Lockwood was a featured writer for Harriet.
Homer Simpson in a chasuble
Stuart Kelly
Spectator.
334.9848 (May 27, 2017): p52. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Priestdaddy
by Patricia Lockwood
Allen Lane, 14.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 336
This is one of the most remarkable, hilarious, jaw-droppingly candid and affecting memoirs I have read for some time --not since, perhaps, Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or Rupert Thomson's This Party's Got to Stop.
Patricia Lockwood is a poet--dubbed 'The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas'--who, after unexpected and costly medical bills, was forced to move, with her husband, back to her parents' home. Her mother is more than mildly neurotic, fretting over things like children jumping out of windows in imitation of Superman. Her father is a bad player of the electric guitar, an enthusiast for guns and hunting, a veteran of nuclear submarines (where he watched The Exorcist endlessly) and a man who sprawls around in his underwear at home. The twist is that he is also a Catholic priest.
Lockwood describes this anomaly as a loophole endorsed by Pope Benedict XVI. The Rev. Lockwood was already a celebrant in the Lutheran church, after his horrormovie inspired conversion, and then became a Catholic--a perfectly permissible, if rare, phenomenon. But this sets the scene neatly for the ensuing surrealism, as the opening description of her father demonstrates:
Some men are so larger-than-life that it's
impossible to imagine them days-old and
diapered, but I've always found it the easiest
thing in the world to see my father as a baby,
lolling on his back in the middle of fresh sheets,
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smoking a fat cigar to congratulate himself on
his own birth, stubbing out the cigar--with
great style--in the face of his first teddy bear.
The enforced closeness to her family allows Lockwood to muse on her religious inheritance. Her husband asks what exactly they believe and she unleashes a riff of epic proportions, beginning: 'First of all blood. BLOOD. Second of all, thorns. Third of all, put dirt on your forehead', and on and on for the rest of the beautifully blasphemous paragraph. Knocking religion is a fairly easy game, but to do it while retaining a sense of elegy for lost belief is a much more difficult proposition, and Lockwood gets the balance right. The scenes between her and the seminarians who also occupy the house are touching and strange.
But although the elevator pitch--Homer Simpson in a chasuble--is pretty obvious, the book is actually much more than just a forensic dissection of her parents' foibles and oddities. One chapter, entitled 'Voice', is a genuinely profound meditation on what being a poet means, without the fatuousness and self-congratulation that often accompanies such writing. Lockwood writes about a kind of lexical synaesthesia, where words have an arcane visual similarity to their own meanings, in a striking and original way.
There is also some trenchant material on the ecological damage done to many of these Midwest towns, with a polemical edge in revealing how certain medical problems in local families, including Lockwood's own, might be attributable to industrial and radioactive waste. Again, this is done with a combination of manic levity and profound unease, a sense of genuine injustice tethered to a smart-alec whipcrack.
Other reviewers may say that Lockwood has a 'sassy' style. She has perfect comic timing, a righteous--even self-righteous --indignation and a knowledge of when these registers should be deployed. It's just good writing, and a profound capacity to be honest. There is joy to be found in almost every sentence.
One of Priestdaddy's most empathetic aspects is, in the end, I would rather meet Father Lockwood than the author --something he would no doubt gleefully air-punch at, given his combination of disinhibition and curious pride in what his daughter has achieved.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kelly, Stuart. "Homer Simpson in a chasuble." Spectator, 27 May 2017, p. 52. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498581949/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=13c269d1. Accessed 22 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498581949
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Priestdaddy
Kelly Blewett
BookPage.
(May 2017): p23+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage http://bookpage.com/
Full Text: PRIESTDADDY
By Patricia Lockwood Riverhead
$27, 352 pages
ISBN 9781594633737 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR
Some people are born to write, and one of those people is Patricia Lockwood, who knew at age 6 that she would be a poet. In the final chapter of Priestdaddy, her debut memoir, Lockwood-- whose poem "Rape Joke" won her a Pushcart Prize in 2015--marvels at her own forcefulness: "On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength." In this brilliant and heartbreakingly funny book, the poet returns to her childhood home and offers the story of her unconventional Catholic upbringing and her larger-than-life parents.
Lockwood's father, believe it or not, is a Catholic priest who converted to the faith after he was married. In such circumstances, there is a celibacy loophole, and Lockwood and her four siblings grew up on rectory grounds in St. Louis and Cincinnati, which Lockwood loyally refers to as "the worst cities in the Midwest." When she became a teenager, she fell in love on the internet and ran away to marry Jason, which, miraculously, turned out to be a great decision. In adulthood, however, the couple fell on hard times and found themselves moving back in with Lockwood's parents--her guitar-strumming, boxer-shorts-wearing, holy and emotionally aloof father and her paranoid, accommodating and lyrical mother. Surrounded by the vestiges of her childhood,
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Lockwood begins thinking anew about identity, place, religion, girlhood and poetry--always poetry.
This is a book that will transport the reader deep into Lockwood's zany and appealing point of view. The sheer authority of the prose will occasionally take the reader's breath away. To say I could not put the book down does not do it justice, nor would quotations from the dozens of pages that struck me as beautiful and unforgettable and weird. Do yourself a favor and read this memoir.
--Kelly Blewett
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Blewett, Kelly. "Priestdaddy." BookPage, May 2017, p. 23+. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492735151/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=524e63c1. Accessed 22 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492735151
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Lockwood, Patricia: PRIESTDADDY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lockwood, Patricia PRIESTDADDY Riverhead (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 5, 2 ISBN: 978-1-59463-373-7
A noted young poet unexpectedly boomerangs back into her parents' home and transforms the return into a richly textured story of an unconventional family and life.After Lockwood (Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, 2014, etc.) discovered that her journalist husband, Jason, needed lens replacements in both his eyes, the pair "[threw themselves] on the mercy of the church." This meant going to Kansas City to live with her mother and eccentric father, an ex- Navy man and former Lutheran minister-turned-deer-hunting, guitar-wielding Catholic priest. For the next eight months, Lockwood and Jason, who had met online when both were 19 and begun their peripatetic married life not long afterward, found they were like "babies in limbo": dependent on parents after 10 years of living on their own. Throughout, Lockwood interweaves a narrative of those eight months with memories of her childhood and adolescence. Though not always occupying center stage, her father is always at the heart of the book. The author describes her "priestdaddy's" penchant for creating "armageddon" with the guitar, which he treated like some illicit lover by practicing it "behind half-closed doors." At the same time, she confesses her own uncomfortable proximity to church pedophile scandals and clerics that had been forced to resign. Lockwood treats other figures--like the mother who wanted to call the police after discovering semen on a Nashville hotel bed and the virgin seminarian "haunted by the concept [of milfs]"--with a wickedly hilarious mix of love and scorn. Yet belying the unapologetically raunchy humor is a profound seriousness. Episodes that trace the darker parts of Lockwood's life--such as a Tylenol-fueled teenage suicide attempt; her father's arrest at an abortion clinic sit- in; and origins of the disease and sterility that would become her family's "crosses" to bear--are especially moving. Funny, tender, and profane, Lockwood's complex story moves with lyrical ease between comedy and tragedy as it explores issues of identity, religion, belonging, and love. A linguistically dexterous, eloquently satisfying narrative debut.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lockwood, Patricia: PRIESTDADDY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485105140/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=93756368. Accessed 22 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105140
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Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
The Antioch Review.
72.4 (Fall 2014): p803. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 Antioch Review, Inc.
Full Text:
Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood. Penguin Books, 66 pp., $20.00 (paper). Patricia Lockwood is an intense new poet with an immense Twitter following; her poem "Rape Joke," moreover, has received over thirty thousand Facebook recommendations. Interestingly, it isn't a typical Lockwood poem, although it has undoubtedly achieved popularity because of its provocative title and subject, its direct, incantatory style, and its prose format: "The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking." It's an effective piece--angry, sardonic, dripping with Americana--but anyone who opens Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals will notice that many of the other poems shine even more brightly, more strangely.
"Revealing Nature Photographs" confronts humankind's rape of our planet: "nature is big into bloodplay, / nature is into extreme age play, nature does wild inter-/ racial, nature she wants you to pee in her mouth, nature / is dead and nature is sleeping and still nature is on all fours." The last sentence reads: "You can come in her eye." The poem is a wild ride.
Lockwood's poetry surprises, delights, challenges. "List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers" begins playfully but morphs into a soulful lyric about a brother surviving the Iraq war. In "The Descent of the Dunk" the basketball dunk becomes a character: "The dunk evolved, and then stood upright, was even perceived to be intelligent, with too big a brain at the top of it, the ball." The "land" of this poet's mind is a garish, often perverted Disneyland with such hypnotic power that some visitors might not want to leave at all.
Frankel, Alex M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals." The Antioch Review, Fall 2014, p. 803.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A386920057/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=502d4ea5. Accessed 22 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A386920057
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Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
Publishers Weekly.
261.17 (Apr. 28, 2014): p109. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
Patricia Lockwood. Penguin, $20 trade paper (68p) ISBN 978-014-312652-2 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
With her second collection, Lockwood (Balloon Pop Outlaw Black) continues to develop a poetics that interrogates those categories to which societies pledge allegiance: nation, gender, nature, and sexuality. Nothing is off limits here and often the poems' responses to their subjects-- whether natural, political, or epistemological--are a fumbling, projective sexual ecstasy: "Your sight and your hearing increase, like wheat/ and the wind in the wheat..../ Blue sky increases above the wheat/ and you know what it's like to grow a ... well." At home where the startling is status quo, Lockwood's provocative "Rape Joke" sees itself plain: "The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you're asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you." Fiercely smart and aching with imagination, she addresses what it means to be "a series of places where animal parts could emerge," yet remains able to wonder "how can there be enough room in America to make what makes it up." Lockwood's poems register the full force of what they deliver and yet admirably refuse to see that as a reason to back away: "The gulf between a word and what it represents is still so great, but a shocking reflection of perfect tits floats and will always float there." (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals." Publishers Weekly, 28 Apr. 2014, p. 109.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A366866876/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=756509d4. Accessed 22 Jan. 2018.
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Priestdaddy
Kathy Sexton
Booklist.
113.15 (Apr. 1, 2017): p13. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Priestdaddy.
By Patricia Lockwood.
May 2017. 352p. Riverhead, $27 (9781594633737). 811.6.
Lockwood's memoir is a study in contrast. Her father, who became a Catholic priest after he was married and had a family, also happens to only wear boxers around the house, play classic rock guitar, and read Tom Clancy. Lockwood's mother adheres to the social mores of Catholicism but also enjoys a good curse and manages several rounds of puns about a semen stain found in a hotel room. And Lockwood herself, a poet who abandoned the church long ago, loves a dirty joke but still knows exactly what she should be doing at every moment during a service. After Lockwood and her husband fall on financial troubles, they move back into her parents' rectory to regain their footing. This collision of worlds brings a flood of childhood memories filled with antiabortion protests, a bizarre youth group, and the push against her conservative upbringing. Lockwood magically combines laugh-aloud moments with frank discussions of social issues and shows off her poet's skills with lovely, metaphor-filled descriptions that make this memoir shine.--Kathy Sexton
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "Priestdaddy." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2017, p. 13. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491487835/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=345452c2. Accessed 22 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491487835
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Briefly Noted
Laura Kolbe
The New Yorker.
93.14 (May 22, 2017): p84. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text: Briefly Noted
Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead). The central character of this vivid, unrelentingly funny memoir is the author's father-a Catholic priest whose first stirrings of faith came, after he was already married, by way of repeated viewings of "The Exorcist" while he was serving in the Navy. Lockwood, a poet, is a "long and fatally lapsed" Catholic, but, she writes, "All my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we." Her stories of growing up immersed in the pro-life movement and in Church arcana-and, later, of taking her ailing husband to live with her parents in their rectory-are both savage and tender, shot through with surprises and revelations.
Six Encounters with Lincoln, by Elizabeth Brown Pryor (Viking). By focussing on meetings that President Lincoln had with lesser-known figures, such as John Ross, chief of the Cherokee, this history aims at deconstructing Lincoln's mythic reputation as the Great Emancipator to arrive at a more nuanced view. The man who emerges had a short temper and a penchant for bawdy, off- color humor; supported abolition only insofar as it would help expedite the end of the war; and voiced concern for the welfare of Native Americans but turned a blind eye to corruption in his Administration that led to the routine pilfering of tribal lands. Pryor paints a provocative historical portrait while testing common assumptions about an American icon.
Mikhail and Margarita, by Julie Lekstrom Himes (Europa). Blacklisted by the Soviet authorities, Mikhail Bulgakov, the great Russian satirist, spent much of the nineteen-thirties unpublished and living in penury. This richly imagined retelling of those lean years-which gave rise to his phantasmagoric novel "The Master and Margarita"-mixes fact and fiction to create a narrative that is both foreign and familiar. Readers acquainted with Bulgakov's work will recognize the memorable tropes: a burning manuscript, a delirium tremens diagnosis, linden trees at Patriarch's Ponds. Yet the novel is not a tribute but a complex and original work, written in a style that is the polar opposite of Bulgakov's antic magic realism.
The Fortunate Ones, by Ellen Umansky (William Morrow). The restitution of art works stolen by the Nazis provides the background for this debut novel. A Chaim Soutine painting called "The Bellhop" unites two women: Lizzie, a lawyer mourning the death of her extravagant, difficult father, and Rose, a former Kindertransport refugee with dark memories of Vienna, Britain, and Los Angeles. The painting belonged to Rose's family before the war; later, Lizzie's family,
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amassing a fortune in California, owned it for a while. Umansky shrewdly avoids letting the issue of stolen art crowd out other aspects of the story, to which she gives a feminist tilt. Reconciling career ambitions with the pressure to have children occupies Lizzie and Rose as much as the crimes of the past do.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kolbe, Laura. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 22 May 2017, p. 84. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492475103/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=325a8fe4. Accessed 22 Jan. 2018.
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11 of 11 1/22/18, 9:38 PM
Patricia Lockwood’s Crowd-Pleasing Poetry
By Adam Plunkett
May 29, 2014
“It’s like if you had a bad daughter—a VERY bad daughter—and it is Thanksgiving, and she keeps yelling sexual things at the turkey as you set the platter down.” This is how the poet Patricia Lockwood, an exemplar of brilliant silliness who has been called the poet laureate of Twitter, has described her own writing. She puts it mildly. Her most recent book of poems, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” published this month, is so full of outlandish sexual impropriety that it would make any bro blush, and that’s part of the point. Here and elsewhere, her sexual-political target is all manner of straight-male privilege, every objectifier and braggart, whom she outflanks on both counts. It’s hard to keep one’s cool, casually sexist or otherwise, reading poems like “The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer” or “He Marries the Stuffed-Owl Exhibit,” a poem less about marriage than consummation. (“He marries / the stuffing out of the owl and hoots.”) You thought you were edgy, but listen to her tell Bambi to “look at the fawn / and grow an antler.” Listen to the fawn say, “Oh Bambi … oh Bambi” and just try to sustain your sexual confidence. She’s bolder, more sure of herself, than you are, and she has a genius for writing in the language of vulgar misogyny as she speaks to its absurdity.
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.’ ” Parodying a touch-typing program that many of her readers will recognize from grade-school, she writes, “Mavis Beacon bursts out of the computer and shows me where to put my fingers.” “Mavis Beacon urges my fingers to move faster, faster, and ever faster. ‘80 words a minute or your money back,’ she whispers.” 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.”
It’s commonplace to say that Lockwood fits uncannily well on social media, especially on Twitter, but I worry that she fits herself to it. I don’t mean that I think that she tries to, only that the constant reinforcement can hardly be without its temptations, especially for someone who wrote for years without expecting anyone to read her. (The rewards are real: she raised ten thousand dollars for her husband’s medical bills just by asking people for help.) I also don’t mean that Twitter is stupid but, rather, that it rewards careful phrasing, careful impersonating, brisk readings of cultural attitudes—in short, rhetoric. Her crowd claps loudly at jokes, especially provocative ones, and the lowest common denominator feels provoked to respond, begetting further jokes at their expense.
It’s striking how much Lockwood’s new book reads as though it were written for an audience different from that of her first book, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black” which was composed in obscurity and is rather obscure and abstract. Its cover art notwithstanding—a blue-tinted cartoon of dogs with Popeye faces and swollen forearms—this is a book with dozens of pages describing characters who are also the alphanumeric characters that compose them. Popeye, for instance, is also the word “Popeye.” “His parts are letters. Letters make up his mind.” The middle sequence, an eighteen-page poem about a cartoon character and his mother, “The Cartoon’s Mother Builds a House in Hammerspace,” is about the inner lives of characters who, by the physical laws of most cartoon universes, can conjure objects, such as hammers, at will. “Even the act of extending an arm toward him produces a trombone,” because she cares, being his mother. “When he was young, she suffered an excess of connective tissue. Suffered from/with and and and.” Her highbrow cartoonism treats cartoons as if they were philosophical problems, and vice versa. It’s a way to make sense of the disconnect between pop emotional life and her intellectual life, and in this it’s a variation on themes by Anne Carson, who imagined Hektor in a kind of Hell as he recreated the Trojan War for TV, and whose lineated prose also moves between casual argot, arch abstractions, and striking descriptions of inner life. “A baby is born in the V of a tree and the light is a lapful of limes,” Lockwood writes, her words somewhere between Dr. Seuss’s and a four-year-old’s, collapsing cartoon and life. These moments are wonderfully strange but lost in a sea of abstractions. The book would have benefitted from her finding a form in which people could feel its conflicts more readily. It’s too private, too much in her head. Her new book is the opposite.
It is funnier, and its poems are shorter. Their titles are headlines, nearly tweets. “Search ‘Lizard Vagina’ and You Shall Find.” “Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It.” “The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics” (Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman). Everything is so much more straightforward than the poems in “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black” that I even sort of understand this book’s title (“Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals” refers to different metaphors for our love of the American heartland, as you learn in “Is Your Country a He or a She in Your Mouth,” which is also about oral sex). The funniest parts—and there are many—all feel rather search-engine-optimized, titles and jokes ready to tweet. (“Last of the Late Great Gorilla-Suit Actors”: “the blondes he never even / liked, the bunches of blondes he mistook for bananas.”) Even the zany comic sexuality, unsettling as it can be, is never more nuanced than the brutish, broish caricature she tweets about and that tweets back at her. In “The Hornet Mascot Falls in Love,” for instance, the hornet is sexual aggression incarnate: “Oh he want to sting her…. The air he breathes is filled/with flying cheerleader parts.” It’s easier to laugh at what he represents—“astonishing abs,” sports, machismo—than to feel his sexual frustration and anger. “Revealing Nature Photographs,” a poem transposing onto nature the ways we objectify women, ends with a repulsive invitation: “Nature turned you down in high school. / Now you can come in her eye.” This is addressed to a man but written for people to laugh at him, even if the poem doesn’t evoke Nature well enough to think of her as any sort of woman, let alone one whom you repressed your anger toward. But the subtleties of men’s desires were never the point.
This is all worth saying because Lockwood is so clearly capable of real emotional depth, even on Twitter. In fact, “Rape Joke,” her best poem, a poem that went viral, probably wouldn’t have been written if Twitter hadn’t been around. “Rape Joke,” collects the sort of publicly appealing jokes she’d make on Twitter only to question the jokes’ appeal to her audience and to herself. It moves between outrageousness and outrage—rather than expressing them together, as usual—attitudes that align with both general interest and general uncertainty. At first, the rape joke is that any joke about a rape is inappropriate to the point of absurdity. “The rape joke is that you were nineteen years old,” the poem begins, as if to say that the actual joke you expected would amount just to laughing at a nineteen-year-old for being raped. This has the trappings of a righteous polemic. But, instead, she tempts us to laugh at rape jokes, as she herself is tempted. “The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living. / Not you!” “OK, the rape joke is that he worshipped The Rock. / Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.” “The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.” By the time I read the less obvious jokes, I want both to laugh with her and not to help her laugh it off. (“The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.”) The question of whether any rape joke could be appropriate, of whether “Rape Joke” itself is appropriate, feels urgent because it puts me in conflict with myself and never tips her hat either way, even in the end:
The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.
Admit that you would like to laugh it off, admit that you can laugh at this with me, admit that you’re not sure what you should do. The ambiguity ensures that this is never anything more than a joke or anything less than a poem.
The world is full of rape jokes, but there can be only one “Rape Joke.” Still, I hope that Lockwood follows its example, if not in its self-doubt than at least in its not having its ideas settled from line one. This would presumably make her more open to the emotional lives of the men she mocks, which of course would help her to mock them if she chooses to. But her talent for humor extends beyond mockery, and I wish she’d bring to all her humorous poetry the same openness she brings to “Rape Joke,” the same ability to compel as she repels. If the poems strike cultural nerves, all the better, but there are probably too few of them for her to find them reliably. And she shouldn’t have to depend on what Twitter likes, anyway. Her followers will read her regardless.
Adam Plunkett is the assistant literary editor of The New Republic.
Photograph by Gesi Schilling/O, Miami.
In Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood Goes Home to a House ‘Made for Screaming’
By
Christian Lorentzen
Patricia Lockwood. Photo: Grep Hoax
Patricia Lockwood’s new memoir Priestdaddy is part origin story, part narrative of her time in the wilderness. Except here the wilderness is actually a homecoming, a regression from low-rent provincial American hipster paradise back to the crucifix-appointed parental home — in fact a rectory, because through a loophole in Catholic doctrine Lockwood’s father Greg is that rare animal, a priest with a wife and five children — in the un-bohemian heartland.
This isn’t the story of entitled millennials moving back to mommy and daddy because the big bad world was too hard. Lockwood and her husband Jason Kendell, neither of them college graduates, had spent an itinerant decade as committed bohemians. She was the house genius and he was her “Leonard Woolf figure,” the breadwinner who allowed her the freedom to write poetry full time. They were living in gorgeous and gothic Savannah, Georgia, where he had a job at a local newspaper. They were skating by with a joint bank account hovering in the three figures. He liked his job, and she’d broken into the pages of The New Yorker. But then his eyes started to go. He needed immediate surgery to remove cataracts if he was going to keep his vision. Their insurance covered only a fraction of the cost, but they were able to raise the funds — around $10,000 — by seeking donations online from their community of “internet addicts,” as Lockwood’s mother Karen called them, actually a mix of Weird Twitter and Poetry Twitter, zones in which Lockwood was amassing cult-like celebrity for her pithy, profane, absurd, obscene, hilarious sayings. As she writes, “connections forged in filth and nonsense are strong.” They were lucky but not too lucky — after two surgeries Kendall’s condition “was like waking up in the morning to find that English had rearranged itself, or that all pretty women had been scrambled into Picassos.” He quit his job because he could no longer read headlines, and they moved in with her parents in Kansas City.
Lockwood is the author of two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (2012) and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014), and she is famous for her poem “Rape Joke,” originally published on the Awl in 2013 and generally considered the most viral poem of all time. In the Guardian Viv Groskop wrote that it “casually reawakened a generation’s interest in poetry.” The one wrong word there might be “casually”: The poem relies on the venerable formal device of anaphora — most lines begin, “The rape joke is” — to animate and render unstable Lockwood’s survivor testimony. “Rape Joke” also demonstrated her singular talent for transforming trauma into art as beautiful as it is painful, and doing so without compromising her incandescent wit. That talent is on display throughout Priestdaddy, though the book is hardly all about pain. It’s mostly the story of a very loving and eccentric family, full of American contradictions and dense with brilliant sentences that Lockwood seems to toss off as if she were brushing lint from her sweater. One of the lines in “Rape Joke” goes: “The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.” (Note the subtle deployment of “asking for it.”) Priestdaddy ensures it won’t be the only thing.
Most American discussions of religion begin with the word “faith,” but it’s not a word that comes up much in Lockwood’s book, and as a fellow lapsed Catholic I can relate. The word I think of is “church,” not the institution looking over the mountains to the Vatican but the place I went every week to recite the creed whose every line began “We believe” (more anaphora). What followed those words was for a child more real than your own life. “Does God exist, was never a question for me then,” Lockwood writes. “Do I exist took up the whole of my mind.” Church stopped when you stopped going to the building and stopped repeating “We believe.” For me, a longtime altar boy, it happened after I was confirmed (confirmation name: Job). For Lockwood, it happened around the same time, age 12 or 13, when she told her father she wasn’t going anymore, he asked her, “Well, if it isn’t true, why would so many people have died for it?” She replied, “Dad, people have died for every religion.” The “checkmate look on his face” vanished and he was quiet. She calls Catholicism a language she spoke a long time and then repurposed in her poetry, in lines like, “God has so many abs that he look like a corncob.” The departure doesn’t prevent a form of permanence: “The word ‘God’ does not fall out of the vocabulary, as the sun does not fall out of the sky. The shapes of the stories remain as do their revelations.”
Moving back in with her parents is an initially infantilizing experience for Lockwood and Kendall. “I shrink inch by inch,” she writes, “until I am no longer an adult but a baby toddling along in a comically oversized business suit.” At night she pats her husband on the back, he belches and says, “You burped me!” But for all its awkwardness, the homecoming is a soft landing. Lockwood’s teenage years hadn’t been without strife, suffering, and sadness, and she and her parents are surprised how pleasant it is to live together again. “I never thought it would be so much fun to have you home,” Greg says. “It’s so nice when your kids grow up and you don’t have to kill them anymore.
Mother and father are wacky right-wing baby-boomers bedeviled by internet memes that tell them China has unleashed secretly satanic rosaries on the world and a new form of diarrhea is killing the elderly. For her father, the world has been going to hell since the advent of communism and modern art eroded gender roles and ruined architecture, especially church architecture. “Architecture requires an equal balance of the male and female in order to be beautiful,” he says. “According to those standards,” his daughter writes, “the perfect cathedral would be a gigantic Prince symbol people could pray inside.” Though parents and child occupy opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrums, the trait unifying boomer and millennial Lockwoods is a gently perverse imagination. The family dog is named Whimsy.
Greg married Karen, an Irish Catholic, in high school, joined the Navy an atheist, and flipped to Christianity after repeated viewings of The Exorcist while serving on a submarine called The Flying Fish. Back on shore he became a Lutheran minister, then converted to Catholicism, remaining both clergyman and family man through an obscure Vatican-endorsed exception for ministers converting from other denominations. At home he wears a cassock when he’s not simply sitting around in his boxers cleaning his handgun or shredding his guitar atonally with Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly providing backing vocals. Lockwood expresses some anxiety about her ability to capture her father on the page: “‘I can only write down what you say,’ I tell my father silently, tired of editing him with such childlike vigilance, of choosing only the quotes that show his brightest side. ‘Please give me something. Be a human being.’” But he emerges with a vividity that will be familiar to the lapsed children of religious men given to reactionary grunting and voting for Donald Trump. (Lockwood’s campaign dispatch for the New Republic from Trump’s victory night in New Hampshire was a model of cutting observation and oppositional sympathy.) It’s useful to keep in mind that the man watching Schwarzenegger movies in his underwear at home spends many of his days baptizing babies, conducting marriages, delivering sermons, and administering last rites to the dying.
Lockwood’s chronicle of her homecoming at times lacks dramatic tension, but it’s consistently charming, particularly her interactions with an Italian seminarian staying with the family until his ordination will make it all but impossible for him to have the sort of chummy friendship with a woman he enjoys with her. More than the return, the retrospective chapters of Priestdaddy lodge themselves in your mind, especially the stories with redemptive Catholic shapes. Some of these are lightly comic — her online courtship with Kendell while living alone in a nun-less convent after her resigned acceptance that her parents can’t afford to send her to college at St. John’s in Annapolis, or a family hunting trip involving blessings of doe urine to conceal the hunters’ human presence. Others creep into painful territory in a manner similar to “Rape Joke” and address her ambient awareness of criminal sex abuse by priests in her father’s diocese; the family’s participation in anti-abortion-rights actions, including her father’s arrest; and illnesses among children in her St. Louis suburb that probably resulted from toxic residue from uranium secretly refined there in the 1940s for the Manhattan Project.
In a chapter called “Voice,” Lockwood writes of having to get over her love of music in order to become a writer. She begins in praise of her sister’s singing: She “was born with a musical instrument lodged halfway down her throat”; “when she opened her mouth the forward curves of doves came out.” Patricia wasn’t so fortunate: “Let me be honest: my voice sounded like the final cry of someone killed by a falling piano.” From here she narrates her love of singing, her failure to do it well, and the predicament of an unhappy teenage misfit in a house full of other misfits (parents included), a house that seemed “made of screaming.” She attempts suicide with a hundred Tylenol but is saved with a trip to the hospital. After much barfing, “I was astonished to still find myself in possession of a sense of humor.” Her father appears the next day at her bedside: “My father came too, and sat in an unyielding metal chair against the wall and talked, his voice quieter and more targeted at me than I had ever heard it. He said, ‘The last time I tried to do it …’ and the rest floated away. The gentleness of the words was so lovely, the tone, the undulations, the caress. He sounded like a wave in a woodcut.” Moving from a place of light into darkness and then returning to light is something very rare indeed. It has the shape of salvation.
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Picture Everyone Naked
Patricia Lockwood’s ‘Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals’
By STEPHEN BURTJULY 18, 2014
Photo
Patricia Lockwood Credit Illustration by Peter Arkle
It’s always wrong to judge a poem by its retweets, but when a literary work, by a poet not world famous for something else, gets hundreds of thousands of “shares,” “likes” and other such notices online, within weeks of publication, it’s time to ask why. That is what happened, in 2013, to Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke.” Like rape itself, “Rape Joke” was no joke: “The rape joke is that you were 19 years old,” it began. “The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend. . . . The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.” To readers who had suffered similar outrages, Lockwood offered wit and a fed-up solidarity; to others, the poem brought news.
“Rape Joke” stands out in “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals” not because it is so popular, not because it is her best poem (it is not), but because it is the only poem in the whole book that does not try to be funny. Many of Lockwood’s titles are grabby, over the top, titillating and outré (“Search ‘Lizard Vagina’ and You Shall Find,” “Is Your Country a He or a She in Your Mouth”); many of her characters are grotesques, cartoony, pixelated dreams — a talking basketball, the Loch Ness monster, the “Last of the Late Great Gorilla-Suit Actors.” Usually these characters are uncomfortably childlike, or hypersexualized, or both. “An Animorph Enters the Doggie-Dog World” addresses its 11-year-old protagonist: “You walk to school and sit next / to a girl who was born with a tail and you copy off / her. . . . You seem to be only / a series of places where animal parts could emerge.”
Pointless weirdness gets old fast (as it got old in Lockwood’s too-clever-by-half first book, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black”), but here the weirdness almost always carries a magnificent, and political, point. If sexual and social norms make some of us (especially the young) feel monstrous, out of place, unheard, unprotected or out of control, then Lockwood will speak for the monsters — for the Loch Ness monster, for example, in “Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It” (“Doing what, I don’t know, being alive”). Like the best stand-up comics, Lockwood seeks honesty, an honesty inseparable (for her) from the jarring, the awkward, the malformed, the disconcerting, from the tones and topics (especially sexual ones) usually excluded from polite company.
No wonder she thinks a lot about who gets to speak. “The Feeling of Needing a Pen” takes the old equation of the male member with privilege, and with writing implements, to a deliberately ridiculous extreme: “Really, like a urine but even more gold, / I thought of that line and I felt it, even / between two legs I felt it.” An even better poem, “The Hypno-Domme Speaks, and Speaks and Speaks,” likens the language of poetry to the language (also accorded special powers) of hypnotists’ spiels, and of sex talk.
Such conceits suit an era in which “eyeballs” are currency, when we may think new work must seize our attention immediately (and what gets more attention than sex?) if that work is to be noticed at all. In her eager omnivorousness, her love for the shocking, Lockwood can be — as Rimbaud aspired to be — absolutely contemporary, and that desire to be scarily modern is one of her subjects.
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Another subject is childishness, the needy, awkward honesty that children can bequeath to their future selves. Adult life, adult sexuality, are from a child’s point of view absurd: A child learns to understand them, in Lockwood’s poem “The Third Power,” as he learns, or cannot learn, to view 3-D Magic Eye pictures, which “refuse to open for him / or show even their innocent parts.” And if to enter the picture, to accept the sexual and economic lives that adults see as natural, is to enter the world of “Rape Joke,” wouldn’t it be better to stay outside?
But there is no outside: Even the most puerile characters, even the talking animals, must learn about sex, and money, and death, as if the world were one enormous school. “The teacher writes quiet please on the board. The pig / who came to school today is unprepared for the squeal / of chalk. It asks is something else in here dying the way / I’m going to?” With puns, cartoony satires and asides, Lockwood skewers over and over the idea that sex is the key to happiness, or to the natural, or to the real. “Revealing nature photographs,” in the poem of that name, look just like dispiriting porn: “Nature is big into bloodplay, / nature is into extreme age play, nature does wild inter- / racial . . . nature is sleeping and still nature is on all fours.”
Lockwood sets almost all her work in a rough, run-on line, a bit speedier than blank verse. She puts two poems instead into short blocks of prose. One is “Rape Joke,” the poem least engaged with literary tradition; the other is the most. “The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics” imagines, or travesties, Emily Dickinson (the father) and Walt Whitman (the mother) amid a crazed parade of soft porn and selfies: In it “breasts have gotten bigger, because American poetry is accumulating in our lungs and has to push its way out.” Lockwood is not the first American poet to combine feminism with shock value, and both with digital-era caricature (look for a 2010 anthology called “Gurlesque”), but she is the first to incorporate such a gift for storytelling, and to get it so right.
“The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you,” Lockwood writes. It will not be. The poet maintains a popular Twitter feed, @TriciaLockwood, full of off-color quips and rimshot-worthy similes. Her pages owe something to such online forms, and something to performance poetry, with its demand for the raw real thing. But with its extended figures, its theme-and-variations structures, its spirals and twists away from (and sometimes back toward) ordinary speech, Lockwood’s new book rewards rereading. She is never subtle. Her work could seem dated soon. But those limits should not occlude her strengths. She has written a book at once angrier, and more fun, more attuned to our time and more bizarre, than most poetry can ever get, a book easy to recommend for people who do not read new poetry often — as well as for almost all the people who do.
MOTHERLAND FATHERLAND HOMELANDSEXUALS
By Patricia Lockwood
66 pp. Penguin Poets. Paper, $20.
Stephen Burt is a professor of English at Harvard and the author of books including “Belmont.”
A version of this review appears in print on July 20, 2014, on Page BR13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Picture Everyone Naked. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
Reviewed By Kent Shaw
October 29th, 2014
Are you going to read Patricia Lockwood’s new book Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals? Yes. You can’t help it. Like you can’t help wanting sex, in your brain sex, on your body sex, repetitive sex, again, AGAIN! sex. Are you listening sex. Are you listening to this? Because this is Patricia Lockwood doing the twitter and the pornography and “The Rape Joke Poem” in all the intensities you’re looking for. Want me to ruin it for you? Her mother and father are having sex in the opening poem. In front of her. It’s sex! And not just describing a fatherland indistinguishable from a motherland when the speaker walks into their bedroom. And not just the positions, and the mountains and valleys and DOWN THERE’s that are existing here in the poem. The real sex in this poem and all the poems is voice, insistent voice, keeping saying voice that once it gets started, gets started. Like if every sentence of the poem were actually a metaphor for YES! And some of these poems have long sentences. Some of them have short sentences.
Like imagine if Russell Edson had decided that he was going to make poems that were about the spaces between his sentences. That weird feeling you get in your head when a Russell Edson has ended one sentence, and you’re kind of crazy for what will be in the next sentence. Patricia Lockwood has taken that energy, and spelled it out YES! and then made that YES! a sentence. And for my reading, and for all the poems in this book that make reference to sex, I would say these are sexual poems. Sexual, like the rhythms of sex, the sometimes repeating and sometimes varying rhythms of sex, inside your head there is blood rushing around during sex making other rhythms of sex. When you read Patricia Lockwood’s poems this is what you’ll be feeling.
SEXY! But not sexy, too. “I like sexy,” you say. No problem. Just think of the world as a sex partner. The world populated by taxidermied owls and monuments that have a woman’s curves. There’s curiosity, especially that curiosity. Canada is in the world. And family. “I’m having sex with my family?” Avid sex! Gross! So maybe it’s not about real sex, but figurative sex. The human body has a capacity for paying special attention during sex. Maybe you’ve noticed. Like a stuffed owl in a museum case takes this role on in your brain where it is actually STUFFED OWL! (YES!) with stuffing and weird googly eyes and owl-stiff postures. This is the best owl in the world. You better believe it. It’s important, and it’s only an owl! One time I walked through the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, DC lusting after my 70-year old tour guide. I thought about her and me in every room. In different positions, too. That museum trip felt very important. I was paying attention! That’s what I feel in Lockwood’s poetry. Attention and YES! and discovering and the pleasure of discovering and the keen interest that all I want is discovering as the essential part of my life. Like this part of “An Animorph Enters the Doggie-Dog World”:
Discover the power at age eleven. Discover all powers
at age eleven. A kittenhead struggles out of your face
and the kittenhead mews MILK, you gasp with its
mouth and it slurps itself back. Yet the mew for MILK
remains, you drink it. You think, “I am an Animorph.
“
Your sight and your hearing increase, like wheat
and the wind in the wheat. Well you’ve never seen
any wheat but it sounds good, to you and your new
trembling ears.
Notice here (1) the declarative mixed with the imperative creates a feeling of language nonstop-ness, and (2) the feeling of discovery is compared to a kittenhead growing out of your face, and the kittenhead asking for MILK, and you drinking down that request like wanting and getting to want something are exactly what you need. Then notice (3) how this string of logic actually increases your senses. It’s like sex. But it doesn’t have to be literally sex. Granted, everyone seems keen on a Patricia Lockwood tied to sexuality. But be fun with it, people. Be imaginative sexual. Be courageous sexual. Be thoughtful sexual. Be metaphorical sexual, too.
Patricia LockwoodBecause the book is breathing with metaphor. Or panting with metaphor. Or exasperated with metaphor. The book is tired with a metaphor-driven critique of persistent information overload. Everywhere we look it’s the 21st Century. And that means we want to and need to tell everyone that we looked at the world. Take a picture. It will last even longer! We are so acquisitive of this world, and that acquisitiveness creates more information about the too much information already out there. In “When the World Was Ten Years Old,” Lockwood describes a boy who “entered encyclopedias and looted every fact of them and when he had finished looting these he broke into the Bible.” Everything’s mine. I take it it’s all mine.
But a concept like “mine” is complicated for Lockwood. There is a porousness to words, as in a poem like “Love Poem Like We Used to Write It,” where “love poem” and what we think “love poem” could possibly do is exacerbated by all the associations that stick to “love poem,” to the point that our talking about any “love poem” with any kind of certainty just starts to look ridiculous. The now familiar poem “Rape Joke” uses a similar tactic, but with an honesty spliced in with Lockwood’s more typical satire so that the poem doesn’t only comment on the troubling fact “rape joke” is even a term, but also that what happened to this speaker is tragic, what happened is a fucking joke, and “joking” about it allows even more of the tragedy to come to light.
Did you like Balloon Pop Outlaw Black? That part about Popeye? Popeye as method of analysis, as subject, as subjectivity, as analysand, as he’s just a cartoon character, why are you getting so intense on him? The material world is intense, people. It’s reality, and what we look at reality with, and what reality would be if we weren’t looking, and don’t forget the reality when we’re looking right at it. Lockwood is like Jorie Graham as a hummingbird, where if Graham’s reality has a veil separating the abstract from the concrete, and Graham would approach the veil so she could indulge that thin separation between the two, Lockwood will plunge and whip around every part of what makes reality a reality. There’s an abstract to reality, too. Don’t forget. So goes the figure of Popeye in Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. So goes the speaker in Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexual, who wants and then wants to want more if only to make wanting to want more like a trajectory that keeps drawing itself out even while we think that just wanting something will supposedly make it ours. It turns out wanting is another of those porous words. All of this sounds so uncomfortable. It is!
Kent Shaw's first book Calenture was published in 2008. His work has appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, Boston Review and elsewhere. He begins teaching at Wheaton College in Massachusetts in Fall 2016. More from this author →
‘Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,’ ‘Directing Herbert White’
Bro culture figures in both Lockwood’s and Franco’s poems.
Grep Hoax (left), Anna Kooris
Bro culture figures in both Lockwood’s and Franco’s poems.
By Michael Andor Brodeur Globe Staff July 19, 2014
You may find yourself feeling at home in the world that poet Patricia Lockwood surveys in her second collection — but getting comfortable could be another story. Take these lines from the book’s longest poem, the title of which can’t be printed here, but which connects the lineage of a certain brand of lewd selfie to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson: “Walt Whitman is the Number Two Beach Body every year, because/ look at the way he snapped back into shape only months after/ giving birth to American Poetry.’’
Fans and followers of Lockwood’s Twitter account — and she’s racked up nearly 45,000 of them — will recognize her brand of delightfully bite-size, comic surrealism, especially her ongoing series of “sexts,” which, on the infrequently printable side, go something like: “A ghost teasingly takes off his sheet. Underneath he is so sexy that everyone screams out loud.” These, along with the Whitman-Dickinson poem and another long work in the collection, the viral hit single “Rape Joke,” offer some assurance that Lockwood is a poet as at ease with 140 lines as 140 characters.
In Lockwood’s world, the rules, roles, and requisites of sex, gender, and power have generously stretched their jurisdiction to preside over everything from the deepest reaches of nature to the most American pockets of pop culture (one poem with an unprintable title focuses on a hypersexualized Bambi). And her lines feel fresh but footed, with the studious curiosity of Marianne Moore, breathless adventures in anaphora that conjure Anne Waldman slapping “Makeup on Empty Space,” and the slightly sinister laugh lines so deftly deployed by young poets like Chelsey Minnis and Dorothea Lasky.
The context is conquest, and Lockwood doesn’t so much turn the tables as flip the whole house upside down. Desire is less of a storm than an entire climate; even Mother Nature must remind Father Time: “Eyes up here buddy.” A man “marries the stuffing out of” an owl exhibit at a rest area, a hornet mascot breathes air “filled/ with flying cheerleader parts”; and porn thrives in a lewd wild in “Revealing Nature Photographs,” where you can “see men for miles around give nature what she needs,/ rivers and rivers and rivers.”
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Many of Lockwood’s lines bear a smutty, clickbait undercurrent that’s only partially comic; this is especially so with her titles: e.g. “Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It,” “Perfect Little Mouthfuls,” and “Is Your Country a He or She in Your Mouth,” which could have made just as good a title for the collection, with its concise conflation of sex and violence, the way it expects an answer from you when you’re unable to speak.
This is most effectively unpacked in “Rape Joke.” “Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question,” she drily reminds us toward the end of a poem that takes turns lighting that question on fire and extinguishing it with spit takes: What starts with “The rape joke is that you were nineteen years old” makes its way to “OK, the rape joke is that he worshipped The Rock,” to “The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.”
Funny and cutting — and not without its share of the inevitable missteps that come with exploring sketchy woods such as these — the poems of “Motherland” may be reflected in the Oakley lenses of bro culture, but they also magnify the vulnerability that gives machismo its purpose, as in “List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers,” Lockwood’s reflection on her younger brother’s service in the Marines, in which “[d]isguised women were always among them,” and “They write each other, ‘Miss you,/ brother.’ Bunch of girls, bunch of girls.”
After a few hours with Lockwood’s poems — with all their hornball anxieties and gorilla-suit overcompensations — a pass through James Franco’s debut collection can feel like a safari into the very bro-normative ecosystem that Lockwood devotes her poems to savaging.
“Directing Herbert White” along with its titular poem refers to Franco’s confoundingly literal and oddly narrow film adaptation of “Herbert White,” a harrowing early Frank Bidart poem about a necrophiliac killer and the young girls’ bodies he visits in the woods. In Franco’s film, we see Herbert driving, cursing, dragging, and having sex with corpses. What we don’t get is a word of Bidart’s poetry, nor a lick of subtext. It becomes hard to fathom why we’re watching what we’re watching. As it happens, Franco’s poems recall this unsettling lack of scope.
Franco’s poems aren’t so much autobiographical as they are confined to the focus of a selfie. We get to see the artist/actor/hyperdilettante switching bungalows at Chateau Marmont to dodge visits from Lindsay Lohan; we hear tales of scoring with girls in the Haunted House at Disneyland; and we sit through hammy homages to James Dean, River Phoenix, Marlon Brando, and Heath Ledger. We also get to see him presume that line breaks add significance to recollections of cracker-dry recountings of grade-school field trips. Throughout, one wonders whether Franco knows that putting music in his poems requires more than naming them after Smiths songs.
At its most interesting, the collection comes off like a cross between the Dos Equis guy and, well, James Franco. At its worst, it’s like being trapped on a date with a chronic mansplainer whose deepest fear is silence. To rummage for a signal of Franco’s poetics (bro-etics?) is to return unassured, with revelations like “And now I see that everything has had as much purpose/ As I give it, or at least it can all make its way/ Into my poem and become something else.”
With that, Franco may want to follow the lead of his imagination — and become something else.
More information:
MOTHERLAND FATHERLAND HOMELANDSEXUALS
By Patricia Lockwood
Penguin, 80 pp., paperback, $20
DIRECTING HERBERT WHITE
By James Franco
Greywolf, 96 pp., paperback, $15
Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com.
Correction: The title of Patricia Lockwood’s book was incorrect in an earlier version of this article.
Review: Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
Patricia Lockwood
Poetry
80 pages
6” x 9” Paperback
ISBN 9780143126522
First Edition
Penguin Books
New York City, New York, USA
Available HERE
$20
In her second collection, Patricia Lockwood brings to the table a feast of strangeness, abhorrence, and humor packaged together in such a way, the reader has to take his time to digest each course.
The book opens with poems that almost make you believe Lockwood is trying to distance her words from readers. With titles like “Is Your Country a He or a She in Your Mouth” and “The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer,” it is easy to see how some might turn away before reading on, but that would be a mistake. Lockwood thrives on understatement and dry humor. The strangeness that follows is merely a vehicle to draw the reader closer into the work.
In “Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It,” she uses the mythical Loch Ness Monster to discuss sexuality, spirituality, and free thought:
I will be different there,
she thinks, with a powerful wake ahead of me.
When will the thinkers come for me. Visited only
here by believers. Is so deep-sea-sick of believers.
When will the thinkers come for here, where
the green stretches out before me, and I am my own
front lawn.
Lockwood has a devout Twitter following, most would say brought to her in the publication wake of “Rape Joke,” her poignant poem that addresses the absurdity of a joke being made of a heinous crime of both physical and psychological violence. The poem appears a little over midway through the collection to grab the reader’s throat, leaving slight bruising and the inability to speak for a few moments afterward:
Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.
Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends —
haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke
for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.
The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.
The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.
The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really.
Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds.
Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.
The poem “Why Haven’t You Written” keeps to Lockwood’s style of understatement. Near the end of the piece, the speaker addresses the reader — the other half of an ended relationship — directly, displaying a challenging tone, while still reaching for closure:
Most letters were love letters until they were not.
That was when the mail began to change —
and “enveloped,” the only word that was believed
to contain its meaning, was opened and found to be
empty. Back then it meant something when my letter
never arrived, and now after ten years reaches you,
who are dead or in love with a lookalike, or so full
of hate for me that you can barely see to read this.
For me, Lockwood represents what’s to come of poetry. She’s modern in her language, but like all writers, she’s transcribing the same themes and ideas that have been here since we’ve been here.
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Steak-Umm out of Sacred Cows
Patricia Lockwood’s poetry, and the discomfort it’s meant to cause squares like me.
By Jonathan Farmer
140530_BOOKS_Motherland_AUTHOR
Patricia Lockwood.
Photograph byGrep Hoax
Here’s the thing: For the most part, I don’t like reading Patricia Lockwood’s poems. They make me feel slow-witted and over-serious, clumsy, credulous, and uncool. They make me feel like the guy who ruins all the fun. Her poems aren’t wrong; I am that guy. But I don’t like being reminded.
And it’s not just that. A few pages into her second collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, I start to feel that I’ve entered a word where seriousness is unwelcome and sentiment suspect—where outrageousness is essential but actual outrage, mine or anyone’s, is altogether out of bounds.
But I’m wrong. Lockwood’s “Rape Joke” is not just the most shared poem in the still-short history of social media (the publicity materials for Motherland claim that it got more than 100,000 likes on Facebook), or the reason that a poet who skipped the machinery of poet-making and has only one book under her belt just starred in a splashy New York Times Magazine profile. It is also one of the most amazing poems I’ve read recently. Not only does it do the things I imagine her poems won’t; it does them uniquely well precisely because of those qualities that make me think they can’t.
Lockwood works at the intersection of camp and cool, a place where enthusiasm and indifference overlap.
There are, of course, other reasons that the poem works, including Lockwood’s relentless jigsaw wit. But more than that, “Rape Joke” astonishes me because her bone-deep suspicion of sincerity—her commitment to making Steak-Umm out of sacred cows—enacts, in its uncomfortable relationship to the subject at hand, the ways rape traps its victims inside a set of contradictions that require and resist communication. At once unspeakable and obvious, pervasive and singular, rape locks its victims in an identity that is as caustic as it is cliché, and Lockwood’s wild unbalancing act makes the endless, unsolvable aftermath real even as it asserts her right to define that which insists on defining her.
“The rape joke is that of course there was blood,” she writes, “which in human beings is so close to the surface.” Much of Lockwood’s poetry performs her freedom from expectations—the unwillingness to have her writing hemmed in by the strictures of taste or even the bounds of physics—so in this line the act of naming, so plainly, her common human vulnerability devastates me. Soon enough, she’s once again her own somewhat unreliable interpreter:
The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.
The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.
“You’re asking for it ”? This is hardly artless.
The poem ends:
The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.
It’s fitting that the final moment is both so plain and so overcharged with possible meanings. Coming at the end of the poem, “Admit it” refers not only to the idea that the gift might be “a little bit funny” but to the fact that the rape took place—a fact both victim and society try to ignore. (That sense is made stronger by the line’s echo of the famous “Write it!” from Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”) More subtly, and more to the point, it’s a pun on the rapist’s unwarranted power to force someone’s body to admit his; taking the form of a command, it abruptly turns the speaker’s attempted authority, the attempt at control that drives the poem from its very first sentences, on the person reading her words.
Subversive, ingenious, a little elusive, and, yes, funny, that two-word last line, like the poem as a whole, is Lockwood at her best. It’s also, if I’m paying enough attention, a reminder that my discomfort with Lockwood’s other poems (one of which appeared in Slate) might have something do with my advantaged standing as a straight white male in the culture she handles with such imaginative disregard.
Lockwood tends to work at the growing intersection of camp and cool, a place where enthusiasm and indifference manage to overlap—as in these lines from “The Hornet Mascot Falls in Love”:
The air he breathes is filled
with flying cheerleader parts. Splits
flips and splits, and ponytails in orbit,
the calm eye of the panty in the center
of the cartwheel, the word HORNETS
—how?—flying off the white uniform.
Cheerleaders are a whole, are known
to disassemble in the middle of the air
and come back down with different
thighs, necks from other girls, a lean
gold torso of Amber-Ray on a bubbling
bottom half of Brooke.
As in most of Lockwood’s poems, she delights in the absurdity of her materials, turning the spectacle up to 11 while she lets its component parts slip loose (in this case, literally). She loves to personify the inhuman at the same time as she depersonalizes the human, creating a swirl of slippery images out of our already ridiculous conceptions. Here, the mascot around whom the cheerleaders break into parts and re-assemble has already started to become what his costume half-heartedly pretends he is; then, as the poem goes on, he starts breaking down and recombining with them, too.
Most of these poems have a kind of narrative momentum and depend for their effects on the relentless shifting of concepts and identities. The story never stops, but its premises keep changing on the fly, sort of like a longer version of Lockwood’s famous Twitter feed, which often features comedic “sexts” such as this:
The poems go further, though, letting the absurd implications of American life and language turn unreal and real, divorce and marry or, more often, simply get it on. These may not be my kind of poems, but I can’t dismiss them.
140530_BOOKS_Motherland_COVER
And yet I still feel compelled to be that guy, if only for a moment. Why “Amber-Ray”? Why “Brooke”? Here and there in these poems, Lockwood’s jokes seem to see the poems’ intended audience more clearly than their subjects, and the rest of her work loses something by its implication in that sometimes-cliquish relationship. (It’s a note she plays in a slightly different key with her bio, which boasts, somewhat condescendingly, that she “was born in a trailer in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in all of the worst cities of the Midwest.”)
There’s much to be said for irreverence, though, even for a reader like me whom irreverence makes uncomfortable. (As it’s meant to.) There’s certainly value in having imaginative, energetic fun at the expense, for example, of our dangerous American reverence for football culture, or of most any reverence, or at the expense of nothing at all, though sometimes the stakes run out before the riffing does, as they do here in “He Marries the Stuffed Owl Exhibit: At the Indiana Welcome Center”:
He marries her mites and the wires in her wings,
he marries her yellow glass eyes and black centers,
he marries her near-total head turn, he marries
the curve of each of her claws, he marries
the information plaque, he marries the extinction
of this kind of owl, he marries the owl
that she loved in life and the last thought of him
in the thick of her mind
just one inch away from the bullet, there,
he marries the moths
who make holes in the owl, who have eaten the owl
almost all away...
For all of Lockwood’s skepticism, though, and all of the ways in which she skewers sentimentality, she also, as times, manages to clear new space for feeling. In an interview with the Rumpus, Lockwood described poems as “places.” It’s a surprising term for a poet whose writing can’t sit still, but I’ve found it helpful in thinking about who these poems are for. For the nimble, the skeptical, and the restless, writing like this represents a way to be in a country whose failures seem to them as much aesthetic as they are ethical. Take, for example, our culture’s objectification of women, which poem after poem reanimates in excess. In “Revealing Nature Photographs”: “nature/ makes gaping fake-agony faces, nature is consensual dad-/ on-daughter, nature is completely obsessed with twins.” Lockwood’s poems are less a critique of that culture than an alternative opened up sideways to it, a place made of the mind’s freedom to move through it on its own outrageous, occasionally indifferent, improvisatory terms.
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Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood. Penguin.
Review: The ‘Rape Joke’ Poet Patricia Lockwood’s New Book Is Great
By
Kat Stoeffel
Patricia Lockwood is the author of the viral poem “Rape Joke.” It is a national treasure that energized contemporary poetry — a viral poem — and provided the perfect, final word in the rape-joke debate, if we can call it that. For that reason alone, “Rape Joke,” and Lockwood, should enter the canon forever and be required reading for all U.S. citizens.
The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.
The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.
The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.
Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”
No offense.
(Re-read the rest at The Awl; it is better than you remember.)
A lot of people feel this way — more than 40,000 follow her on Twitter — so it probably should not have been surprising that Lockwood’s new book of poems, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (which contains “Rape Joke”) was the source of a minor backlash dustup this week. After a big, glowing profile of Lockwood in The New York Times Magazine, The Toast wrote that her book had been given a sexist review by The New Yorker online. The Awl further observed that only men had been assigned to review it.
In Adam Plunkett’s New Yorker review, he condescendingly “worries” that Lockwood has succumbed to the “temptation” of “constant reinforcement” Twitter offers, and this need to be well liked and heavily “liked” has shaped her poetry for the worse.
I also don’t mean that Twitter is stupid but, rather, that it rewards careful phrasing, careful impersonating, brisk readings of cultural attitudes — in short, rhetoric. Her crowd claps loudly at jokes, especially provocative ones, and the lowest common denominator feels provoked to respond, begetting further jokes at their expense.
Calling Lockwood a Twitter poet has the same effect as calling a woman who writes novels about other women a chick-lit author. It gives men — in particular the serious ones still largely in control of prizes and grants and review sections — permission to ignore her work. It’s not an explicitly gendered label, but the negative connotations of the Twitter poet overlap with those of the chick-lit author, the women’s magazine editor, and the pop starlet. If she is successful, it is because her product cannily catered to the preexisting demands of the crowd, not her own intellectual or artistic vision. I think women are especially sensitive to this critique, because it mirrors one often made of us sexually: If we are popular and make ourselves accessible to many, we must be whores.
Because of the commercial success of chick-lit authors and Twitter poets — compared to writers who are shaped by the niche, exclusive demands of M.F.A. workshops (Lockwood never even got a bachelor’s degree) — it’s easy to see critiques like The Toast’s as “bellyaching,” as Jeffrey Eugenides once put it. Fuck prizes; get money, I often think. But Plunkett, sneakily, did something more sexist than genre-pigeonholing. Using Lockwood’s Twitter as an online proxy, Plunkett managed to review Lockwood’s personality, not her poems. She is far from the first female writer to be evaluated in this way (Marisha Pessl comes immediately to mind), nor is she the first female author whose social-media output has been taken as a sign of literary apocalypse. Remember when Jonathan Franzen listed “Jennifer Weiner-ish [Twitter] self-promotion” among the things “wrong with the modern world”?
Having read Motherland, and being a woman, this my review: It is a fantastically weird little book that makes funny and creepy almost-fables out of sex and gender and the business of writing. That it is all this to someone who follows neither Lockwood’s poetry scene nor her comedic Twitter personality is a virtue. But I can also say that Plunkett’s attempt to link Lockwood’s Twitter persona to her poems (“the zany comic sexuality … is never more nuanced than the brutish, broish caricature she tweets about and that tweets back at her her poems”) is weak. It misrepresents what the majority of the poems in the book are about (alas, not men!), and misunderstands the ones that are.
For example, “Revealing Nature Photographs” addresses a person who, like an adolescent boy rooting around in his dad’s stuff, discovers a “stack of revealing nature photographs.” “Nature” is “into bloodplay” and “on all fours” and “wants you to pee in her mouth.” “Nature turned you down in high school. / Now you can come in her eye.” “This is addressed to a man but written for people to laugh at him, even if the poem doesn’t evoke Nature well enough to think of her as any sort of woman, let alone one whom you repressed your anger toward,” Plunkett complained. “But the subtleties of men’s desires were never the point.” No, for once, they were not. Lockwood is, however, playing with poetry’s clichéd marriage of women and nature by reversing directions. What if the prosaic ways men (not all men) describe women in real life and through pornography were applied to capital-N Nature?
In fact, my favorite poem in Motherland offers precisely the nuanced, emotionally deep take on masculinity Plunkett demands of Lockwood (a request not often made of male poets about femininity). “List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers” begins as just that, ticking off famous female soldiers in history, before it becomes about her brother, who served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his military machismo. “Women should not be over there,” he tells her. “I watched people burn to death. They burned to death in front of me.” She then contrasts his benevolent sexism to the feminine bond between him and his army buddies.“They passed the hours with ticklefights. They grew their mustaches together. / They lost their hearts to local dogs, / what a bunch of girls.” One of these friends was killed by a roadside bomb that missed her brother, she explains, “because of a family capacity for little hairs rising on the back of the neck.”
Trapped in a print book, I couldn’t fave or retweet Lockwood’s lines. Instead, they left me crying on the subway. But maybe that was just some hormonal thing.
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February 2, 2015
(Book Review) Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
By David Nilsen
MotherlandI want to sit down for coffee with Patricia Lockwood. No, that’s not true. I want to throw back a few shots of whiskey with Patricia Lockwood, though her linguistic inhibitions don’t really need any help in lowering. Reading Lockwood’s newest volume of poetry, 2014’s Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals from Penguin (811.6 Lockwood), feels like a close enough approximation to listening to the poet tipsily lilting a few bawdy but cuttingly clever bar songs from across the booth. These poems were meant to be read aloud, and online testimony confirms her readings are wickedly fun affairs.
The titles of the poems in Homelandsexuals are poetry in themselves and serve as paper-and-ink clickbait on the table of contents – List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers, The Whole World Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer, Last of the Great Gorilla Suit Actors. Her poem about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, a swirling reflection on literary influence, sensationalism, and privacy in the selfie age, is titled The Mother and Father of American Tit-Pics. Because of course it is. Also, Dickinson is the father and Whitman the mother there, just so we’re clear.
Between her absurdist, ironically prurient poetry, her riveting live readings, and her popular and hilariously perverse Twitter feed, Patricia Lockwood reads like what would happen if David Lynch and Sarah Silverman had a love child who grew up reading Sylvia Plath and watching Kids in the Hall. Her poems, a potent mix of sex jokes and cutting social observation, read like pornography for the world’s (or Portland’s) lonely literary dreamers. Lockwood’s poetry is the deleted search history of the lovelorn MFA student.
If you haven’t read her two books of poetry (Homelandsexuals and 2012’s Balloon Pop Outlaw Black), you may have read at least one of her poems without realizing it. In 2013, she released the piece Rape Joke online and it went viral, garnering somewhere around 100,000 likes on Facebook and getting passed around on every major social networking site. Poetry is not exactly a literary medium given to going viral, but Lockwood’s poem hit a nerve.
(trigger warning for rape and sexual assault)
In the piece, she tells the story of a rape she suffered in her late teen years and the following struggle of processing and recovering from the trauma. In the process of telling her story, she poignantly looks at how we talk about (and don’t talk about) rape in the first place. The debate over whether there is ever an appropriate place in comedy for jokes about rape and sexual assault has been a hot topic over the last few years, especially in the wake of some high-profile comedians demonstrating exactly the wrong way to make such jokes, if indeed the right way exists at all. In Rape Joke Lockwood somehow manages to weave wit and, yes, even humor into the telling of her own assault story, as evidenced in even the opening lines (page 40):
The rape joke is that you were nineteen years old.
The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.
The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.
and later in the poem:
The rape joke is sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.
The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.
(page 41)
Almost any segment of the five-page poem could be pulled out as an example of the pain, poignance, insight, and (uncomfortable as it may be) humor that Lockwood blends within the piece. In a fascinating interview Lockwood gave for the New York Times, the poet had this to say about her choice to write about the topic of rape the way she did in this piece: “The real final line of ‘Rape Joke’ is this. You don’t ever have to write about it. But if you do, you can write about it any way you want.”
Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood
Patricia Lockwood is a poet to watch, not only because she’s original and weird and very, very good, but because she’s fun. Too many of the poetry books on our library shelves gather dust instead of feeding the minds and sating the hearts of readers, especially young readers. Poetry has unfortunately gained a reputation among non-academic readers for being dry, difficult, and intimidating. When I was discovering myself as a writer in my teen years it was through poetry, because poetry has the power to be both a gateway to the world of literary expression and also a way of feeling known, less alone. Patricia Lockwood shows it can also make us laugh and smirk without being frivolous and without sacrificing depth and complexity.
As Lockwood said in the above interview, “‘The idea about readers being too lazy to read poetry — they just need an in,’ she said, ‘a voice they can trust.'” My hope is Lockwood will be that voice for many new readers of poetry. After all, what other poet is going to give you a title like Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It?
Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is available now at Greenville Public Library.
Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
Penguin Books, May 2014; 66 pp
Reviewed by Brandon Amico
Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is a lot of things. It is daring, musical, memorable, vivid, human, and often riotous. It is the breathless energy of a twenty-first century that is already beginning to wear itself out.
And “things” does feel an appropriate word here—the collection is bursting with objects, cultural fixtures, and ephemera. Lockwood is a master of homing in on a subject and drawing the eye and imagination all ways around it, and in the process eking out significance. In “The Arch,” the speaker conflates the history of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch with that of another famous construction, and in doing so pulls on the connections we sometimes have with objects and places:
“Was a gift from one city to another. A city
cannot travel to another city, a city cannot visit
any city but itself, and in its sadness it gives
away a great door in the air”
—and later:
“What an underhand
gift for an elsewhere to give, a door
that reminds you you can leave it.”
One thing the book is not: timid.
It takes a level of fearlessness on behalf of the writer to close out a poem, this one titled “Revealing Nature Photographs,” with:
See men for miles around give nature what she needs,
rivers and rivers and rivers of it. You exhale with perfect
happiness. Nature turned you down in high school.
Now you can come in her eye.
Anthropomorphism is a staple of the collection, the most common vehicle toward the human, and really hammers home the theme of loneliness. In “Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It” we see the Loch Ness Monster question her own realness; so we’re shown a nonexistent creature ponder the world through what exists outside of her lake. Her only clues as to her existence are her surroundings and the smudge of language on the “NO SWIMMING” signs beside the water—she has no memory before the lake. In “See a Furious Waterfall Without Water,” Niagara is surrounded by former lovers and drunk at a wedding that was supposed to be held in front of his roaring falls, which he now is holding back. Finally, Niagara breaks, and after a final bitter statement he is “trembling at the very lip, unable to contain / himself, and there he goes roaring / back into her arms.”
Another unequal love is showcased in “He Marries the Stuffed-Owl Exhibit at the Indiana Welcome Center,” wherein the subject of the poem professes his love to not only the physical details of the exhibit and owl, but also its symbolic and unseen aspects:
he marries her near-total head turn, he marries
the curve of each of her claws, he marries
the information plaque, he marries the extinction
of this kind of owl, he marries the owl
that she loved in life and the last thought of him
in the thick of her mind…
And the owl’s reaction to this love is to believe that his kisses are moths that have been taking bites out of her. There are a lot of conclusions you could draw from what the poet has laid out here, dots you could connect, but Lockwood’s style isn’t to lead you to “Aha!” moments; it seems to be more so to toss concepts and images and surprises at the reader so one is not able to linger long on a single moment—the poems here are fast-paced, exhilarating.
Since this review is, in fact, “micro,” I will digress from going on at length about the poem “Rape Joke,” since it has already been covered and dissected from numerous angles after it went viral (it’s worth the outside reading and reflection), except to say it’s exceptional even among this collection of exceptional work, and important to a dialogue that needs to be dialogued.
And speaking of jokes, another key thing to note about Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is that it’s often flat-out funny. It’s not hard to get a glimpse of the poet’s humor just reading down the list of titles, which includes “Search ‘Lizard Vagina’ and You Shall Find,” “Last of the Late Great Gorilla-Suit Actors,” “Bedbugs Conspire to Keep Me from Greatness,” “The Hornet Mascot Falls in Love,” and “The Whole Word Gets Together and Gangbangs a Deer,” the last of which, yes, will make you slightly uncomfortable at first (and shouldn’t most art, including comedy, do so?) but will win most readers over with its brashness, cleverness, and interesting perspective (even as that perspective is used as a set-up to a punchline—or is it the other way around?): “Every deer gets called Bambi / at least once in its life, every deer must answer to Bambi”—and soon after— “Small name / for a small deer. Bambi. Sometimes he feels all the deer / could fit inside him.”
In short: Patricia Lockwood is one of the most exciting, unusual, and interesting poets writing today. There is an energy in these lines that makes for poetry that is both insightful and damn enjoyable. A refreshing collection.
INTERVIEW: Patricia Lockwood, author of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
by Hilary Lawlor
Patricia Lockwood, poet, hilarious twitter wizard, and general destroyer of gender and sexuality stereotypes, recently stopped in to the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle to do a reading in support of her new book, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. I was lucky enough to get to talk to her on the phone beforehand and ask her a few pressing questions about her poetry, lifestyle, and predictions about future incarnations of tit pics for the good of the public.
Hilary Lawlor: As a bookseller, I often have to recommend “also-reads” to people looking for books by a certain author. Who would you want a bookseller to recommend alongside your work?
Patricia Lockwood: So, I’ll go with more modern people, because they don’t necessarily get as much play. Someone like the guys who run Octopus Books, the press that printed my first book, Zach Schomburg and Mathias Svalina, that would be good. Mark Leidner, I really love — I think if people are interested in what’s going on on Twitter, and how that can overlap with literature, Mark Leidner and someone like Melissa Broder, as well, would be excellent. Elisa Gabbert is another really good one.
HL: I read recently that your father was a catholic priest — how do you think that affected your poetry?
PL: Well, a lot of religious language and a lot of liturgical language, I would say, was built into me from a pretty young age. Catholics don’t necessarily read the bible as much as other denominations do, but we had it in our house, so it’s very steeped in that language. But there was also something a little bit more subtle, which had to with authority: I think that when you see your father get up in the pulpit every Sunday and speak with this natural inborn authority, in this sort of declamatory language, it shows itself as a possibility to you, something that you can do. I felt, from pretty early on, that I had a natural sense of authority in my voice, this sort of natural sense of speaking from the mountaintop. I think that’s where this sense came from.
HL: In that same article, you said that you moved out of your parents’ house at 18 and referred to yourself as “18 and a poet” — if you could go back in time and give yourself any advice at that age, what would it be?
PL: Oh, lord. I would probably — this is more personal, but I would tell myself that it’s okay to stand up for yourself. I think a lot of good girls grow up just not really knowing they have that option, and I mean that in a wider sense, too. It’s okay to be assertive, it’s okay to feel like you can take up space in the world. I think a lot of people who’ve been raised to act well and be accommodating to people just don’t even know that that’s an option, or that it’s a desirable option. So, I think that’s the main thing I would say — I don’t know that I was timid, necessarily, but I felt more that I existed for other people. And you have that, too, when you have the sort of home that I grew up in, where it was a little bit more traditional gender roles and seeing your mom acting in a very accommodating way, and you grow thinking that that’s something that you’re going to do, too. I think that I would say that it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.
HL: You also mention that you were self-taught, at least in terms of poetry and literature — what was that like?
PL: I think the nice thing about not going to college is that I never had certain books ruined for me. I think that can be a major side effect of people going through really, really intensive schooling, and that’s not necessarily something that has to happen. So, you know, when you’re about 18, 19, 20 years old, you read things in a very wide-ranging way. You’re not necessarily thinking about what you should be reading. You pick up books in a much more grazing and open sort of way, and I think that was good, because what happens instantly after that period for a lot of people is that they go to college, and then it’s more scholarly — you’re given a curriculum. So, I think that I was able to extend that sort of free-ranging period for longer, which was good. And it’s an interesting thing about being self-taught, too, that you can really just follow a thread of curiosity as far as it takes you. Other things aren’t bearing down on your time, so, you can really just follow these instincts. So, the sort of reading that you do is more like, instead of a straight line, it’s more like a tree, it branches outwards, things touch lightly off each other. So, I do think it’s a little bit different, but I wouldn’t presume to know what it’s like for people who do undergo more intensive intellectual programs. But, I think that’s what happened for me.
HL: What do you make of your designation as a sort of poetic beacon for sexual equality? (laughter) I just mean that many of your poems seem to take today’s stereotypical depictions of gender and sexuality and sort of throttle them with humor. So, what do you make of that role?
PL: Well, it’s very interesting because I’ve been sort of surprised by some of the reaction to my second book, and I was thinking, you know, this didn’t happen with my first book at all. Then I went back and looked at my first book, and I realized there was no sex in my first book whatsoever. I think some of the responses I’ve received have been really enlightening in that regard, in that I’m seen in a much more gendered way. More specifically, like a young sexual poet, which is really funny to me, actually, because what I was doing in that book was following a theme. I think that it is humorous, but I think that it also has bite to it, and so you do sense among some readers a certain factor of intimidation, which is okay. But, it’s interesting, because when you’re writing on your own, you’re not necessarily thinking about how people are going to respond, so, when this one came out, I thought it was really interesting that I was cast that way, or that people would talk about my appearance in things like reviews and articles, because that had just never happened. And I was really surprised, and then I thought, “Oh, it’s because I’m writing about sex.” It just had not occurred to me that that would happen. It sort of caught me by surprise. I was interested in that, but, you know, it does make sense, and it makes sense more in light, too, of what I’m doing on Twitter, which is very much my natural way that I would joke with my friends. I’ve always been fairly inappropriate in my jokes, and I forget sometimes that I have this poetic persona, and in my own mind it’s like this towering column of seriousness, and then I’m like, wait a minute, you’re joking about, like, lucky charm sex online, so it makes total sense that people are going to look at you in a different light now.
HL: How did you become involved with the “weird Twitter” movement? Or is there some sort of taboo around it, like “the first rule of weird Twitter is you don’t talk about being part of weird twitter?”
PL: No, no, it’s nothing like that! People in it don’t really use that name, if you can even be in it. I’m already appropriating language that I don’t even really believe in. But what happened was, I joined up there with a few people I knew — my friend Greg Erskine was on there, people like ExtraNapkins, and they were sort of touching on these groups, and that was my entree. So, I just got on there, and I was tweeting in my normal voice, which turned out to be very congruent, or harmonious, with this kind of thing that they were doing .So, the first five or ten people that I followed were all these weirdos. It wasn’t like I was getting on there and following, you know, Barbara Walters — I don’t even know if Barbara Walters is on there. It wasn’t like I was following CNN to get news reports, it was just weirdos who were making jokes and doing this weird sort of literature. And it became more of a thing later, because a lot of those people are extremely funny, extremely literate, and then people were writing about them more, and sort of talking about them in terms of some broader coalition, which is not really how we thought of ourselves, and which made us laugh. We weren’t taking that sort of thing particularly seriously. But it really was just because my voice, I think, dovetailed well with those voices, and because my friends were on there, and then it was like, well, if I tweet these sorts of things, and they tweet these sorts of things, we start using common language or cross-pollinating each other, you have sort of a moment of group creativity.
HL: How do you feel about — so, there was that one AWFUL review of your book that everybody knows about. How do you feel about the connection made in that review of your poetry and your tweets?
PL: There does seem to be a conflation that I was not expecting. I think it is true that there’s a twitter persona I have that doesn’t necessarily, in my mind, have anything to do with the speaker of my poems. I was taken a little bit aback by that. I think it’s natural for people to do that, especially if they’re casting me in some sort of “social media phenomenon” role. Anyone who’s in that sort of position doesn’t think of herself that way. It sort of did take me aback.
HL: If writing is your main profession, how do financial considerations affect your writing life? At least, prior to your recent published successes.
PL: Yeah, it’s probably bad that they don’t enter into it at all. I think a normal person, or the way normal people participate in the world is they get up in the morning and think, “If I’m going to survive in this world, I can either go to my job or not go to my job,” and for most people, that ends in them leaving their house and going to a physical job somewhere. I wake up in the morning and I just don’t make that consideration at all. I make the consideration about what I’m going to be writing that day. It’s something that ought to be entering in, and I understand that it’s a very unusual that it doesn’t for me. I think it’s interesting, too, because I think a lot of people would assume that I’m in some sort of financially privileged position, which is the opposite of true. If I don’t have enough to eat this week, for most people that would result in going out and getting a job, and I’m like, “I don’t have enough to eat this week, what am I going to be writing tomorrow? How can I work on this poem, how can I fit this into a manuscript I’m working on?” So, I’m not really sure how that works, if it’s some sort of absentminded professor syndrome, or just a person who otherwise should’ve become a nun, cloistered and fed by other people three times a day. I’m not really sure what it is.
HL: When did you know that you would be a poet and what spurred the decision to pursue, mainly, writing, every day, as your primary profession?
PL: I’m sure there’s a compulsive element to it for people like me, but it was just always what I was going to be doing. It was always more important than other things; other things would go by the wayside so that I could do that. When people ask me this question, I try to think back to the specific time that, you know, the clouds parted and the sunlight descended and I knew, but it was just always there. I loved to read books about kids who were writers, you know, back in the day, so that probably had much more of an influence than I thought. Books like L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon series, I think if you read books like that early enough, I think you can really get the sense that some people, even people who are kids, feel called to this, in the sense of it being a vocation, and it really naturalizes that for you, and it just makes the path seem like a very legitimate one.
HL: If Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are the mother and father of American tit pics, what do you think future poets will one day say you’re the mother or father of?
PL: Oh my god, we’re going to have something in the future that is so much more revealing than tit pics, and we don’t even know what it is yet. And THAT is what I’m going to be the dad and the mom of. But, again, we can’t even conceptualize it at this point, our heads couldn’t even hold it, it’s SO NUDE. We’re just going to have to wait, like, a hundred and fifty years and see what they come up with, and that will be seen as my lineage.
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Balloon Pop Outlaw Black by Patricia Lockwood
Reviewed By Josh Cook
April 24th, 2013
Poetry can explore philosophical ideas that are too abstract or chaotic for the usual grammar of reason. As the moorings of human culture and civilization are dislodged from place and nation and as art culture and consumer culture devour each other in Escherian permutations of natural selection while physicists discover mysteries where they used to derive laws, poetry becomes more relevant as a tool for understanding what is going on around us. Though poetry naturally grapples with the abstract, some poets leverage the philosophy of poetry to explore aspects of culture, historic events, and ideas. These poems are able to extend the effect of themselves beyond the impact of images, to the consideration of images.
What can we know about the things in our lives? What is the relationship between the thing and its properties? How do things possess their properties? In the three poem cycles of Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, Patricia Lockwood leverages the philosophical capacity of poetry to explore how mass media, the fluidity of quantum physics, and the idea of precession of simulacra, destabilize the idea of “properties,” and how that destabilization changes the relationship between the things and the properties that define them. Along the way, she writes strange, brilliant, fantastic poems.
What are the properties of a figure, recreated over and over again, represented over and over again, and experienced over and over again, so much so that people feel they have an actual relationship with that figure? What binds together an image on a poster, in a comic, on TV, or in a movie? Using an abstracted poetified version of Popeye, Lockwood explores how entities of mass culture and mass media, handled by person after person, writer after writer, illustrator after illustrator, develop a strange reality distinct from the strange reality of legendary, mythical, religious and other cultural characters like “Coyote” or “Jesus.” Though Lockwood specifically asks, “What is Popeye?” questions like “What is Batman?” or “What is Kermit the Frog?” or even “What is Marilyn Monroe?” naturally follow. This first section, “When We We Move Away From Here, You’ll See a Clean Square of Paper Where His Picture Hung,” despite being the most focused of the collection, will be difficult for most readers. Not only is Lockwood grappling with a very abstract idea, she is also establishing the act of grappling in her collection. She is simultaneously exploring a bizarre, uncertain, and confusing idea and laying the ground work for the exploration of such ideas.
Patricia LockwoodScience used to answer the bizarre, uncertain, and confusing. It used to straighten the blurry lines of endless replication into numbers and laws. But now, physics is discovering phenomena as strange as anything that can be imagined. Spooky action at a distance describes a physics of unstable properties with definitions that shift with shifting perspective. Lockwood writes, “Any piece of paper on which ‘popeye’ is printed counts as a Will, as it contains his signature, his witness, proof of his death, a list of all the property he owns, and the name of his inheritor,” creating an image of fractured singularity, as cogent a description of the madness of quarks acquiring mass through fields of energy you can find outside of equations. “The Mouth,” is filled with shuffling characteristics and in one line from “The Quickening,” she beautifully captures what it means to our experience of the world when its fundamental particles are so unstable; “When checkers are green and blue instead of red and black, they are a game about the ocean and not a game about the war.” The piece can now change color in our hands, forcing us to choose the composition of our experience. “A house in Kansas is made of Kansas. A house in the jungle is made of the jungle. The house here is made of there, is made of the air that a house displaces,” and “Inseparable things are easily separated, she knows. The name of the tea at one end of the string, the tea at the other.”
But choosing the defining properties from the quantum array, does not solve the problems of definition and property. Once you consider the idea of simulations, or copies, “preceding” their originals, and how this extends to effects “preceding” their causes, the distinction between the property and the thing it defines evaporates as well. “Below, from another world, the idea of a house was forcing itself upward, trying to come out on the other side clothed,” Is the house the property of the idea or is the idea the property of the house? Did the idea build the house or did the house build the idea? Even the material of the house won’t stand still. “It’s hard to tell where the house ends and the outside begins—the surrounding of the house almost seems to hold it up.” Is the house made of “house” or excluded space? Is the space made of “not house?” What makes the consideration of making? Precession is a rabbit hole of reason and Baudrilliard’s explication tied my brain in knots. It opens into levels of abstraction foreign to just about everybody. But poetry, by its nature, speaks to our abstract mind, the aspects of our intelligence comfortable with chaos and paradox, and so Lockwood’s images give precession a clarity I’ve never seen in philosophical writing.
Still, Lockwood wrote a collection of poems, not a treatise. Lockwood’s shorter poems are quality works as individual objects and have the intelligent strangeness I personally look for in poetry. Even when grappling with these abstract ideas, Lockwood grounds them in tangible images, giving us the opportunity to both grasp the challenging ideas and enjoy the beauty of pictures painted by words; “A year has gone by without her noticing—time does not flow smoothly here, but grows in bunches like bananas.” At least in terms of Lockwood’s poems, you don’t need to choose, all the properties are always available. Some readers will be put off by the density of this collection, especially while Lockwood is establishing the book’s project, but there is enough beautiful language throughout the philosophical exploration that I believe most poetry readers will find a lot to like. Even separated from the overall structure, “The Front Half and the Back Half of a Horse in Conversation,” “The Salesmen Open Their Trenchcoats, All Filled with Possible Names for the Watch,” “History of the House Where You Were Born,” and others are fantastic poems.
Though poetry is a useful tool for philosophy, I have to ask, what is the end result? Can poetry translate these phenomena into our more “mainstream” systems of sense-making and life-living? If not, how does its exploration inform or assist or contribute to the thoughts we intend to think and the actions we intend to take? If there is no way to carry material from one to the other, is it good, bad, or neither to have a divided consciousness as the standard operating procedure? How could we ever evaluate the material in a way that helps us live better lives as better people? And yet, the impossibility of these questions does nothing to diminish my love of poetry. It might be the source. Too many poets and poetry readers hide from this impossibility, assuming those succinct images of daily life, daily emotions, and daily nature told in daily language are fundamental. That assumption, though, is supported by avoidance; that crystal clear image is only crystal clear if you don’t look at it too hard. Once you do, it is endlessly faceted by the very impossibility it sought to avoid. Balloon Pop Outlaw Black is a bold, brilliant, intelligent, strange collection of poetry, one that transforms that impossibility from an adversary into a dance partner.
Josh Cook is a bookseller at Porter Square Books, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who grew up in Lewiston, Maine. His fiction, criticism, and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and journals. He blogs for Porter Square Books, and at In Order of Importance, and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. An Exaggerated Murder his first novel. More from this author →
Filed Under: Books, Poetry, Reviews
Only Patricia Lockwood Could Get Away with Priestdaddy
Reviewed By Eliza Smith
April 25th, 2017
You’re going to read Patricia Lockwood’s memoir, Priestdaddy—we both know that already. You’re going to read it because you loved “The Rape Joke,” and because you loved the collection in which it lives, Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals, and because you loved all the irreverent weirdness in those pages (Walt Whitman’s tit-pics, especially), you were thrilled to hear Lockwood sold a memoir—a memoir! over 300 pages of rollicking Lockwood prose—and you’ve whiled away the wait by following Lockwood on Twitter, where she is one of the few people who makes you feel better about being on Twitter.
Lockwood’s memoir is that classic tale of a writer and her husband—a man she met on the internet before it was acceptable to do so, now recovering from a major eye surgery crowd-funded by mostly strangers—moving into the Midwest rectory of the writer’s Catholic priest father and Psychopath Test-failing mother. Also living with the happy foursome is a seminarian with whom Lockwood shares her profane knowledge (while also becoming friends, in a unique sense of the word).
Unsure of what, precisely, constitutes a seminarian? Fortunately, Lockwood’s explanations of all things Catholic to her unflappable and equally irreverent husband serve as a glossary for readers as well:
“Okay. A seminarian is an unborn priest who floats for nine years in the womb of education, and then is finally born between the bishop’s legs in a set of exquisite robes.”
“You can’t say things like that anymore, Tricia,” he warns me. “God will hear you.”
“That’s not God, that’s Mom,” I say, raising my voice and pointing at the closed door. Outraged silence. Then a soft rodent shuffling and footsteps retreating down the stairs.
Interactions like these are scattered throughout the book, punctuated by howls from Father Lockwood’s electric guitar and his ALL CAPS EXCLAMATIONS, like “WHAT ARE YOU FEMMES DOING” directed at the writer and her mother. Lockwood explains this one too, less for its Catholic-ness than for its Fr. Lockwood-ness:
He always calls us femmes. It is, believe it or not, a term of affection. When he’s angry, he calls you a feminazi. When he first encountered that epithet, on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in the early nineties, he hugged it to himself as wholeheartedly as a second wife. Nuns are feminazis, Democrats are feminazis, the secretary who asks him please not to call her “dollface” is a feminazi. It goes without saying that I am a feminazi.
It also goes without saying that Lockwood will have you snickering on the train, trying to relay her jokes to friends and strangers alike but receiving confused (and possibly horrified) looks in exchange. Only Patricia Lockwood can get away with a chapter titled “The Cum Queens of Hyatt Place” or recounting the day she lost her virginity to the swimming pool while her father applauded (and critiqued her form).
But as we know from her poetry, Lockwood’s humor can shape-shift into something else entirely, something quite moving. I found myself quieted while she twisted and wound through the story of her childhood youth group, called God’s Gang, in North County, St. Louis, a place where children disappeared and the landfill held 8,700 tons of radioactive waste, a fact meticulously hidden and ruinous to the families living there, including her own. The knowledge gave her a distinct context during the riots following the non-indictment of the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown in the summer of 2014:
And when I see that strong, surging flux of teenagers in the streets, kerchiefs tied over their faces to protect them from tear gas and lit by flares against the backdrop of American flags, I will fill at once with thudding dread and think, I wonder if they are sick too. They must have fished and waded in the creeks and played pickup games on those dirt lots. Their basements must have flooded in the springtime. As they march against a swarm of more imminent dangers, I will wonder if they know, because we did not.
It might come as a surprise that the memoir is not a takedown of the Catholic Church. Lockwood resists that narrative, while also remaining deeply thoughtful and critical of the archaic stances on which her father’s worldview is built. It’s clear she is wrestling with this in the prose: how a life built between such constrictive walls can transform into something freer, though never free.
Priestdaddy is a book necessary for 2017—a meditation on living in the house of an unabashed patriarch, of asserting one’s humanity and continuing to take up space. While her father is ostensibly the focal character, Lockwood’s flashbacks often center on the women who orbited her childhood: her mother, simultaneously scrappy and submissive; the procreating church ladies who philosophized over abortion while their children listened from the corners; the young women, talked out of abortions themselves, who lived in the Lockwoods’ home with their babies until, suddenly, they didn’t. I imagine crowds of women reading Priestdaddy on their morning commutes and rallying for reproductive rights over their lunch breaks. I imagine Pope Francis receiving a thousand Amazon Prime envelopes on his doorstep.
At times, the writing turns meta. Lockwood’s parents know she is writing about them, and they perform and underperform for her in turn. In the final chapter, Lockwood’s anguish over her father’s portrayal comes through at its clearest:
Please give me something, anything: a crumb of the bread that you stand in front of the people and change, a word of the absolution that flows out of you toward anyone who needs it. Forget your gold sunburst and come downstairs, I think, but whole Bibles have been written about the man who wasn’t there, who appeared for some and never others, who was thunder in a cloud.
Lockwood is often referred to as an “outsider”—having taken neither the MFA nor NYC route, in fact not attending college at all—but reading this book made me wonder if perhaps we are the outsiders: we being the unlucky rest of us who do not reside in Lockwood’s poetic, unpredictable brain.
Eliza Smith is an MFA candidate at The Ohio State University and serves as associate online editor for The Journal. She completed her MA at the Missouri School of Journalism, where she was editor-in-chief of Vox Magazine. More from this author →
In Priestdaddy, the writer behind “Rape Joke” tells the darkly funny story of her family
By Constance Grady@constancegrady Jun 1, 2017, 9:30am EDT
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Riverhead
The difficulty with Priestdaddy, a new memoir by the poet Patricia Lockwood, is that it’s easy to make it sound like a David Sedaris book with Catholic inflections, all zany dysfunctional family hijinks punctuated with a well-chosen dirty word.
That’s because Priestdaddy is, as its title suggests, a funny, slightly obscene book. It’s the story of Lockwood and her husband, awash in medical bills, moving back in with Lockwood’s mother and father, the latter of whom is a Catholic priest. (He started out as a Lutheran priest and then converted to Catholicism, and was able to keep his family via a special dispensation.)
Rating
Lockwood’s father as she describes him is given to lounging around the rectory in near-transparent boxers, playing the electric guitar, and muttering darkly about how cats are as bad as Democrats. He washes in Palmolive and scrubs his legs with a rag that “smells like a crime.” Her mother, meanwhile, curses like “a prudish extraterrestrial attempting to approximate human behavior” and has a phobia of finding pubes in a motel room.
Lockwood has an eye for the precise details that capture a family’s neuroses, and the exact turn of phrase that will leave readers snickering and then scrambling to explain to horrified friends why the idea of a priest in transparent boxers is so funny. She mines incredible humor out of the tension between her lapsed-Catholic, feminist adult self and her right-wing, God-fearing parents.
But Priestdaddy is not just a collection of funny essays: It’s also something weirder and twistier and sadder than that.
It’s a fitting accomplishment for Lockwood, who first caught people’s attention when she published the poem “Rape Joke” (“The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny”) and built her reputation on the intersection of Weird Twitter and Poetry Twitter. She gets her hooks into you by being witty and dirty, and then drags you off somewhere dark and thoughtful and hard to laugh at.
So over time, Priestdaddy veers away from the questionable bathing habits of the Lockwood pater and into the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals, and the way the knowledge of what certain priests were doing seeped into Lockwood’s mind without her quite realizing it. It goes into the Lockwood family’s participation in the pro-life movement, and the pregnant young woman they take into their home and then abandon shortly after she gives birth.
And again and again, the book returns to the idea that Lockwood’s father is a literal patriarchy, that to his daughter he represents her father and the Catholic Church and God himself all at once, and that this fact has molded Lockwood’s psyche in ways she is still discovering and dealing with.
“I can only write down what you say, what you do,” she writes to him toward the end of the book, addressing him directly from the page. “Please give me something, anything: a crumb of the bread that you stand in front of the people and change, a word of the absolution that flows out of you toward anyone who needs it.”
What emerges from Priestdaddy in the end is an immensely tender, loving, and melancholy portrait of a family, just as funny and dirty as the title suggests but with an unexpected heart. It’s the best version of what you might hope for when you’re reading a memoir by the poet laureate of Twitter.
Q&A with "Priestdaddy" author, Patricia Lockwood
The fantastic and funny poet Patricia Lockwood has been a longtime favorite at Book Culture. Now, with her new memoir Priestdaddy (Riverhead, 2017), Lockwood takes her voice to a new genre, following her poetry collections Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (Octopus Books, 2012) and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (Penguin, 2014). Before her upcoming reading at Book Culture on 112th Street, we took the opportunity to ask Lockwood some questions:
1. Let's start with the important questions. You once wrote about Robert Frost kissing his neighbor, in a fantastic moment of blissful self-discovery. Beyond this, what would your dream literary couple be?
King David ... and Dan Brown. I just feel they would have a lot to talk about.
2. Your prior two books were both poetry. While Priestdaddy is nonfiction, it's filled with gorgeous imagery that might feel more naturally suited to poetry (I particularly like when you describe echoes as though they have a drawl). How do you view the two genres interacting here?
If I ever wrote a book where I didn't get to compare crescent moons to fingernail clippings, I would actually die. So it's a matter of necessity to me to figure out a way to integrate the two. Otherwise I'd be gasping for air by the end of the first week.
3. Priestdaddy obviously has a lot of comedy, but you add some insightful commentary on social problems, in the conservative Midwest in particular (for example, the "Abortion Barbie" chapter). How do you find the comfort to be so funny, scathing, and insightful (sometimes all at once), especially on such uncomfortable topics?
How else to approach them? They're social problems because they're complex, because they're multidimensional. To attack them from only one angle is to do the reader a disservice. If you have comedy in your arsenal, use that. If you have a sense of the pulpit, use that too. Above all, exercise your empathy to its very limit.
4. Throughout Priestdaddy, you mention how voracious of a reader you are, but your style seems fairly unique. You mention Rebecca West a couple times, but who else would you say are your greatest influences?
My influences are a bit haphazard -- they were simply the writers who were available to me, the ones whose books I had access to in a somewhat circumscribed environment. For poetry, it was first the modernists, then the metaphysicals, and then the New York School. My literary sense of humor can probably be traced back to Jean Shepherd, Jack Handey, and Gary Larson.
5. What are you reading right now?
David Sedaris's Theft by Finding, whenever I get a chance. I like the entries where he's on meth. They're shorter.
Arts has moved! You can find new stories here.
Books
Reading between the lines.
May 31 2017 9:00 AM
Bless Me Father
Patricia Lockwood’s writerly touch in her family memoir is almost too light.
By Katy Waldman
170530_BOOKS_Priestdaddy
Sam Octigan
If certain muses love certain writers, Patricia Lockwood seems to have a special relationship with the muse of fun. For her, fun is more than part of a life well-lived. It has aesthetic value and can open the door to other literary goods: freedom, freshness, generosity of spirit. Even “Rape Joke,” the furious and beautiful poem for which she is best known, deploys a deceptively silly and irreverent style. Lockwood’s commitment to fun burns bright in Priestdaddy, her new memoir about growing up in a devout Catholic family.
Katy Waldman Katy Waldman
Katy Waldman is a Slate staff writer.
When she moves back to her parents’ home in Kansas City, Missouri—she and her husband Jason need to save money for his emergency cataract surgery—she describes amusing herself with a game called “I Guess the Plots of My Father’s Favorite Movies Based on the Sounds Coming Through the Walls.” Elsewhere, she gets drunk with a seminarian (and transcribes her antic riffs on St. Augustine: “Oh God, don’t make me good, not ever,” “Oh God, make me a VERY bad boy, who needs a spanking”). Her very language is fun, a tonal kaleidoscope of faux-gravity and giddiness and sarcasm. Lockwood’s lyric elevation of fun is wonderful and seemingly related to her affection for her family. But one lesson of Priestdaddy might be that such lightness is not lightly achieved.
Lockwood takes obvious delight in the larger-than-life characters who raised her: Greg Lockwood, a priest granted special dispensation to keep his wife and children around after he converted to Catholicism, and Karen Lockwood, a wacky, punny conspiracy theorist who shares her daughter’s verbal gifts.
At first blush, it is Greg who sucks up most of the book’s oxygen. He is an obstreperous diva who parades through the house in see-through boxer shorts, abuses a rainbow of pricey guitars with his “ass rock” solos, hoards cream liquors, and intimidates Jason with his gun collection. He actually evokes another colorful character in recent pop cultural memory: John McLemore, the vivid eccentric at the center of S-Town and a man whose arrant strangeness seemed to forecast a story consumed by the project of cataloging his many quirks. Both John and Greg are driven by appetite but profoundly concerned with moral purity. (The possible contradictions here seem to trouble McLemore more than they do Lockwood.) They opine on the world in extravagantly, mischievously baroque language. S-Town and Priestdaddy point to the challenges of building rich, textured nonfiction around figures so florid that it’s tempting for the narrator to give up on empathetic storytelling and merely gawk.
How to solve this problem? S-Town deepened our understanding of McLemore by adding layer after layer of emotional complexity, inviting us to discover the person beneath the performance. Lockwood, on the other hand, allows her dad to remain a silhouette, a blazing and symbolic force of nature. (After all, as she notes, it can be tricky to sort out the terrestrial father from the divine.) As a kind of compensation, she trains her attention on her mother Karen, the woman who caters to Greg’s windy ego and cares for the children it overshadows. Lockwood may be an absurdist, but she’s a perceptive one. Her mom serves as the memoir’s quiet heart.
170530_BOOKS_Priestdaddy-Cover
Our narrator writes with playful ostentation about subjects that demand it. Of a seminarian’s search for the perfect chalice, she says: “He’s trying to choose between three or four different options, all of which are so crusted with ornament that they appear actually diseased, as if King Midas had contracted an STD and then foolishly touched himself.” And some of the details of her upbringing don’t even need to pass through a shimmering Lockwoodian metaphor to be hilarious. “Did God create the anus to be a pleasure source?” she recalls one youthful educator preaching. “Yeah. Absolutely. In His infinite wisdom, He did.” When a priest voices an offensive or misogynist idea, the author’s prose becomes suffused with pure, intense joy at his wrongheadedness. Her favored modes of critique—bemused tolerance, light mockery, perverse elation—mean that when she does sound angry or upset (a bishop “has the look of someone whom a great deal of reverent attention has been poured into for a long time,” she notes scornfully), you sit up straight.
But for all its madcap humor, Priestdaddy feels fraught with un-negotiated darkness. This makes the book at once fascinating and frustrating: Around the edges of even the silliest anecdote laps our awareness that the gleefully blasphemous narrator once attended protests outside abortion clinics and had swaths of the Bible seared into her memory. Lockwood rarely addresses her reverse-conversion head on, though she flicks at the reasons behind it in charged and elliptical passages about rape, pedophilia, hypocrisy, racism, and sexism. These sections are unfailingly powerful, and yet they never quite connect the dots between the author’s past and present. Her book jumps around in time; the scene that brings the contradictions inherent in her life story to a head refuses to arrive. You do not go from the prayerful daughter of zealots to a poet of the subversive and the obscene without a reckoning, surely. But Lockwood seems undecided about how much she wants to expose.
For all its madcap humor, Lockwood’s memoir feels fraught with un-negotiated darkness.
In that sense, Priestdaddy recalls Lockwood’s previous two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. Those books were somehow arid and fluent at once: virtuosic and changeable and dazzling, but composed in such a way that neither the writer’s nor the reader’s emotions could quite find purchase. A Lockwood poem could remind you of a mirage of water. (“Rape Joke,” which minted her reputation as the poetry queen of Twitter when it went viral in 2013, landed so powerfully in part because it juxtaposed slick wordplay with ragged pain.) Her memoir contains more heart, but it is cautiously and equivocally proffered. The usual uproarious sentences—a regrettably appointed taco joint is “like a nightclub where people went to have wrong ideas about Mexico”—exist alongside moments of naked, un–self-conscious beauty. “Churches resemble forests in one respect,” Lockwood writes. “The light in them is filtered through something else, some live leaf.”
Priestdaddy is not coy or sugarcoated. It explores how the Lockwood women had to shrink to accommodate their patriarch. It discusses the intoxicating “we” that “closes its ranks to protect the space inside it … It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.” The book tallies the physical insults to a working-class community forced to drink uranium-contaminated water, a tragedy that may have imperiled Lockwood’s own fertility. It is ferocious in its portrait of a religious congregation’s response to sexual violence. “Many of us,” she reflects, “were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome.”
But ultimately, Priestdaddy announces itself as a labor of love, an expression of gratitude to Lockwood’s parents and a celebration of their idiosyncrasies. “It was an idyll,” she says of her time in Kansas City, “of course it was an idyll. A family never recognizes its own idylls while it’s living them.” Though she clearly relishes the contrast between Greg and Karen’s piety and her own impudence—and the dramatic potential of having both forces together under one roof—the trajectory here is a homecoming, the return and reintegration of the prodigal daughter. For all the beckoning Catholic mysteries and reassurances that Lockwood has divested in order to live up to her values, she still believes in grace: “I was wonderful at endings, I thought. I found an artful and unexpected one every time. Endings sprang out of the tip of my pencils like bouquets; they were magic; they were silk and illusion; they were not earned.”
Reconciliation and connection are beautiful notes on which to conclude a family memoir. But Lockwood races to the ending, to forgiveness, before fully illuminating what must be forgiven. This makes for grace, perhaps, but not earned resolution, not literary satisfaction. She is stronger when peeling the armor off her language, both the clever acrobatics and the unconditional daughterly affection. Chapters in which she grapples earnestly with poetry as a vocation, including a gorgeous reverie on her sister’s singing voice with a gut-punch of a last line, stand out. So does Lockwood’s realization that her brand of eroticized Jesus-speak “is not blasphemy, it is my idiom. It’s my way of still participating in the language I was raised inside, which despite all renunciation will always be mine.”
Priestdaddy feels like a consecration of that mine, as if the understanding and acceptance Lockwood has reached vis-a-vis her family remains, for now, too raw for challenge. Yet the book is also studded with breathtaking examples of what she can do when she allows her guard to fall.
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Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood. Riverhead Books.
The Good, the Bad and the Hilariously Filthy: Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
By Bridey Heing | May 4, 2017 | 1:46pm
Books Reviews patricia lockwood
The Good, the Bad and the Hilariously Filthy: Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Poet Patricia Lockwood grew up under bizarre circumstances—and with a Catholic priest for a parent. Her family bounced between Midwestern cities during the 1980s and 1990s, as the Moral Majority was rising and the Midwest was gripped by bizarre fears (lightning and child abduction among them). But Lockwood’s new memoir, Priestdaddy, is less an earnest examination of Midwestern religiosity and more a puckish close read of her own family’s complex dynamics.
The memoir’s through line is the nine-month period during which Lockwood and her husband, Jason, lived with her parents after Jason had an unexpected surgery. Over the course of those several months, Lockwood’s first book was published, a seminarian lived with them before being ordained, she went on a road trip with her mother and she experienced other adventures great and small. Each chapter ricochets between the past and present, offering glimpses of her childhood and her eccentric family.
1priestdaddycover.jpgThe titular priest and daddy is Greg, a former rebel who fell in love with a Good Catholic, spent some time as a Lutheran minister and then converted to Catholicism himself after receiving dispensation from Pope-to-be Joseph Ratzinger. Greg is far from the stereotypical priest; he lounges in nothing but his underwear; he plays guitar—but just licks rather than songs; he cooks a lot—a lot—of bacon; and he takes a delight in being unabashedly strange. Equally charming is Lockwood’s mother, Karen, a woman who loves a good pun and takes steroids at one point because she might be allergic to her husband, which would “serve him right.” From the earliest pages, it’s clear that this is a duo for the ages.
Lockwood is known for her brash, trickster social media presence, and that’s on full display here. She simply delights in the absurdity in others—and in creating moments of absurdity herself. Her constant harassment of the seminarian is a recurring high point, including when he has just been ordained and is offering her a blessing. “I licked your hand, dude,” Lockwood says, and it’s easy to see why she jokes that she’s just a little demonic. Not in a dangerous way, just in an up-to-no-good way.
But she also proves to be a gifted narrator in chronicling her family’s outlandishness. Lockwood’s lyrical writing juxtaposes the quotidian low (like when her father refuses to go to a Mexican restaurant after learning that his daughter is moving to another state with her internet boyfriend) with the near supernatural high (like meditations on the anti-choice movement’s language). To read Priestdaddy is to witness quiet moments of gorgeous prose give way to stories about Karen hitting a man with a van known as “thegrindup.com” after leaving the house “under cover of darkness.” The beautiful and the filthy, side by side, just as any God with a sense of humor would intend.
Bridey Heing is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. More of her work can be found here.
Perverted poet Patricia Lockwood runs wild in the memoir Priestdaddy
Laura Adamczyk
5/01/17 12:00amFiled to: Books
17
Image: Allison Corr
Book Review
Lead
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Priestdaddy
Author
Patricia Lockwood
Publisher
Riverhead Books
During last year’s presidential primaries, The New Republic, the century-old liberal magazine of arts and politics, posted (and quickly deleted) a tweet to the future commander in chief: “fuck me daddy.” The tweet’s author, poet and now memoirist Patricia Lockwood, had taken over the publication’s Twitter account when it published her piece “Lost In Trumplandia,” which chronicled the disorienting, visceral experience of attending a Donald Trump rally. The prank was squarely on-brand for the writer, whom The New York Times once deemed the “smutty-metaphor queen of Lawrence, Kansas.”
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Lockwood’s newest work, Priestdaddy, a hilarious and affecting account of growing up with a married Catholic priest for a father, follows two collections of poetry: 2012’s Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and 2014’s Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, which includes “Rape Joke,” a poem that went viral after a controversial stand-up set by comedian Daniel Tosh.
The memoir is centered around a nine-month period when Lockwood and her husband, Jason Kendall, lived with her parents after Kendall underwent an expensive eye surgery for rare advanced cataracts. Lockwood’s re-immersion into her wacky parents’ lives serves as a jumping-off point for examining the formation of her artistic aesthetic—and as an opportunity to flex her comedic muscles. There’s a great deal of pleasure in her line-by-line writing; the author can describe even a seminarian’s ordination ceremony in a colorful, unexpected way, her prose dyed with bizarre sexuality, religious eroticism, and slapstick timing. Lockwood churns out oddball imagery at a breakneck pace, and she, luckily, has a lot of material to work with.
Priestdaddy’s titular Father/father is the kind of oversized personality one would strain to believe in fiction. The jolly tyrant plays face-melting prog rock—“He practices mostly behind half-closed doors, so it’s possible he’s having sex with the guitar? It’s possible that somewhere out there I have a half brother who is a sweet lick from the waist down?”—and is, within his home, always half-naked: “‘There’s no in-between with him, is there. He’s either buck nude or he’s in a little outfit,’” says Lockwood’s husband, who’s no slouch in contributing his own one-liners. Like a supporting sitcom character, the author’s mother, an extreme worrier taken in by conspiracy theories and urban legends, has a knack for popping into a room to say the one thing that perfectly contradicts or supports the extant conversation.
While Lockwood meanders at times within the episodic structure—a drunken church dinner, a trip to the “nation’s wang” of Florida—she anchors the book with insights into how she, an atheist surrealist poet, could have possibly come from these two distinctly nutty people. Her obsessive writing, her preternatural ability to form nearly any idea into language, she admits, is not so different from her father’s religious devotion. Lockwood and her mother’s shared love of ribald wordplay, for example, is exemplified in the chapter “The Cum Queens Of Hyatt Place,” wherein the two discover stained sheets in their room during a trip and devolve into an extended pun exchange. These stories can appear solely comedic at first blush, but it’s not hard to see what Lockwood’s getting at: “As kooky as these people are,” she seems to say, “I’m most certainly their daughter.”
Even when not mashing up sex and religion, Lockwood’s metaphors are tactile and evocative, her poignant turns of phrase shining that much brighter for being placed within all the dick jokes and knocks to Catholic fanfare. She’s particularly affecting when she writes about her attempted suicide at 16 and nearly breaks into song when describing her creative impulse: “My mother and I are after perfection. We are seeking a particular click in the head. We share the feeling that if we hang a picture or set a sentence down just right, we will instantly and painlessly ascend to the next level. We will be recognized, and the time we spent will be multiplied into forever and given back to us.”
The drawback to Lockwood’s boundless, loquacious energy is that the book goes on for far too long, with seemingly every potentially entertaining anecdote included. With the book spanning out like a long-running sitcom, its latter third feels like it won’t provide any new revelations. Which is to say, not all of Priestdaddy’s stories are necessary, though Lockwood’s bad mouth certainly is.
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‘Priestdaddy’ Takes On Priesthood, Fatherhood And The Patriarchy
Patricia Lockwood’s poem “Rape Joke” went viral in 2013. Her 2017 memoir does not disappoint.
By Claire Fallon
Riverhead
No reader of Patricia Lockwood’s irreverent verse would be surprised to discover that her upbringing was a perfect storm of oddities.
Her father, a naval veteran who spends most of his time clad solely in boxer shorts, calls his daughter “Bit” and drinks Irish cream liqueur. He’s also a Roman Catholic priest ― an achievement that, given the Church’s rather strict rules regarding celibacy in the priesthood, required a circuitous path through the Lutheran priesthood and a dispensation from the pope. Her mother, a colorful Irish Catholic matriarch with five children, frequently spouts bon mots grounded in paranoia. For example: “Did you know rats in big cities are getting aggressive from eating too many cigarette butts?”
Lockwood spent her childhood moving from rectory to rectory ― the Catholic Church prefers frequent geographical shakeups over allowing priests to cultivate deep roots in specific communities ― and, increasingly, imagining ways out. When her father bluntly informs her that there’s no money for her to attend the colleges she got into, she finds another way to escape: Falling in love with Jason, a boy she met online who shares her passion for poetry. She runs away with him. They get married young. Several years later, after he needs eye surgeries that force him to leave his job as a newspaper editor, he and Lockwood move in with her parents.
This is where the real action of the memoir begins. As a grown-up, married, extremely lapsed Catholic, living in the home of a traditional (in terms of gender roles) yet unconventional (in terms of clothing choices) Catholic priest and his deeply maternal wife, Lockwood experiences a maelstrom of conflicting feelings. She adores her parents and seems to have a particular closeness to her mother, but frequently finds them ludicrous. Home is familiar, but also alien; comforting, but also claustrophobic. Living in a rectory with Lockwood’s parents, a young seminarian, and copious crucifix-based art stifles them. After they move in, she and Jason “look at each other and realize, with sad certainty, that we will never have sex in this place.”
Instead, as they save up to move out again, Lockwood sits and reads with the young seminarian, periodically offering him educational tidbits about cuckolding and other sexual fetishes. In return, he lets her know that Satanism is “on the rise” in Italy. (“Understand,” she adds, “that hardcore Catholics get their news from different places than the rest of us.”) Her poem “Rape Joke” is published on The Awl and rapidly goes viral. She gets a book deal. She remembers her dad teaching her to swim and how her parents reacted when she first told them about her sexual assault. She goes on a road trip with her mom, who is slightly fastidious about a hotel bed that appears to have semen on it. “I guess a ‘fun mother’ wouldn’t care about all the cum?” she quips.
Her parents’ habits and catchphrases, her oddly religious yet profane upbringing, and her own mischievous attitude toward her childhood religion are the stuff of pure comedy, and Lockwood doesn’t waste a drop of it. Her parents’ and siblings’ over-the-top, slapstick wit seems so unlikely that she goes out of her way to note that she and Jason are constantly scribbling down her family’s riffs verbatim. Her family life needs no punching up. As a memoirist, she can milk all the humor out of human absurdity in one passage (“[M]y mother,” she writes, “is best described in terms of her Danger Face, which is organized around the information that somewhere in America, a house is on fire”). As a poet, she excels at painting familiar and unfamiliar scenes alike in startlingly unexpected terms, terms that force you to reevaluate your own mental pictures. Savannah, where she and Jason lived for some time, “looked like an enlightened underwater city with all the water gone, and seaweed still hanging in the middle of the air. Great mermaids flowed through the streets: southerners. The sun shone down because it was a blonde.”
The book, with its slightly off-color-seeming title, isn’t a lighthearted ode to her youth. She struggles with her father’s ingrained, prescriptive misogyny, which he evinces with the confidence of a man who assumes that his audience agrees, and with his fierce determination to have things all his own way.
And, as the daughter of a Catholic priest, she’s looking back on a childhood and young adulthood that took place in the eye of a brewing storm: the Church’s sexual assault problem and its long, long coverup. The book isn’t about sexual abuse by priests, and there’s no indication that Lockwood herself was ever a victim ― it’s just that the problem was so pervasive, and the coverup implicated so many in the Church hierarchy, that of course she was touched by it. An oily, ingratiating priest who taught at her school later turned out to have been a molester; the bishop she meets at a church dinner reportedly moved predatory priests from parish to parish to hide their crimes. Being deeply embedded in the Catholic community means knowing men of God who did unspeakable things.
It’s a testament to Lockwood’s way with words that glimpses of such grotesque wrongdoing, painfully candid reflection on her youth and her family, and countless sidesplitting anecdotes about her boxer-clad father and her safety-obsessed mother can not only coexist in this book, but weave together seamlessly, constructing a memoir that’s propulsively readable and brimming with humor and insight.
The Bottom Line:
Lockwood’s venture into memoir proves just as hilarious, textured and evocative as could have been hoped.
What other reviewers think:
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Kirkus: “Funny, tender, and profane, Lockwood’s complex story moves with lyrical ease between comedy and tragedy as it explores issues of identity, religion, belonging, and love.”
The Atlantic: “Lockwood’s book is really a rather deliciously old-school, big-R Romantic endeavor: a chronicle of the growth of a mind, the evolution of an imagination.”
Who wrote it?
Patricia Lockwood is a poet and the author of two collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. One of her poems, “Rape Joke,” went viral in 2013 after being published on The Awl.
Who will read it?
Poetry buffs, former Catholic school kids and anyone who loves a well-executed memoir.
Opening lines:
“‘Before they allowed your father to be a priest,’ my mother tells me, ‘they made me take the Psychopath Test. You know, a priest can’t have a psychopath wife, it would bring disgrace.’
“She sets a brimming teacup in front of me and yells, ‘HOT!’ She sets a second one in front of my husband, Jason, and yells, ‘Don’t touch it!’ She situates herself in he chair at the head of the table and gazes at the two of us with total maternal happiness, ready to tell the story of the time someone dared to question her mental health.”
Notable passage:
“I submit that every man of God has two religions: one that belongs to heaven and one that belongs to the world. My father’s second religion is Nudity, or Underwear, to be more precise. There are some men who must strip straight down to the personality as soon as they would through the door of their castle, and my father is one of them. I have almost no memories of him wearing pants, and I have a lot of memories of his sitting me down for serious talks while leaning forward on his bare haunches. He just never wore pants on principle. We saw him in his collar and we saw him in his underwear, and nothing ever in between. It was like he couldn’t think unless his terrier could see his belly button. In the afternoons, he reclined nudely on leather couches and talked to Arnold Schwarzenegger while he shot up the jungle, and every time Arnold made a pun about murder, he laughed with gratification. As far as I could tell, he thought movies were real. He watched them in a state of alarming physical receptiveness, with his legs so completely open toward the television that it seemed possible he was trying to watch it with his butt. His default position was a kind of explicit lounge, with one leg up and the other leg extended, like the worst kind of Jazzercise stretch you could possibly imagine.”
Priestdaddy
By Patricia Lockwood
Riverhead, $27.00
Publishes May 2, 2017
The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.
Patricia Lockwood on ‘Priestdaddy’ and the Secret Language of Family
By Ingrid Rojas Contreras
May 7, 2017
There is a time in a book reviewer’s life when one opens the freshly arrived Media Mail package, cracks open a book, sits for a moment to check out the blurbs, and over the next several hours is never heard from again.
I’ve been on the couch, if you’re wondering, reading Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy, which I hereby proclaim the memoir of the season. Priestdaddy is a memoir of lovely improbables: when Lockwood and her husband have a medical emergency, they find themselves — after years of “tending the pigs of liberalism, agnosticism, poetry, fornication, cussing, salad-eating, and wanting to visit Europe” — as having no other recourse but to move in with her very conservative family.
The most improbable aspect lies in the fact that there are no fights, no confrontations, no disinheriting and forswearing; instead, it is the most hilarious homecoming you might read. Lockwood’s father is a Catholic priest—hello, current and lapsed Catholics: apparently there is a loophole, onward!—who, when not donning finely-accented robes and presiding over religious litanies, likes to lounge at home in nothing but thin underwear and rip electric guitar solos. He also has a soft spot for the movie The Exorcist, because once, deep in the ocean, under the “eerie, pea-soup light” pouring down inside the submarine where he was a Naval sailor, at the 73rd viewing of The Exorcist, he experienced a glorious conversion — an event he calls “the deepest conversion on record.” Look out, Paul!
I meet Patricia Lockwood in San Francisco at a café in the Inner Sunset. The weather, mildly nice, means the cafés are full, and so we sit outside by the soothing sounds of screaming children and screeching cable cars. I begin by asking whether turning to memoir gave her the creative feeling of opening the floodgates after having avoided herself as a literary subject for most of her career. “No,” she tells me, “when it came time to Priestdaddy I didn’t feel unleashed or free. I felt circumscribed, because it was about my family.”
Throughout our interview Lockwood is uniquely energetic, interrupting her sentences to say hello to babies, salute a very fat pigeon, and observe the terror of a pedestrian screaming for the cable car to wait. She keeps masterly track of our conversation, though, in a way I find impressive. Lockwood says that she chose humor over other ways of telling the story, and when asked what role humor has in the world of her memoir, she answers, “[Teasing] is a place where people can find common ground, you can deflate each other’s pretensions a little bit.”
One of the most mesmerizing aspects of Priestdaddy is the lack of confrontation, even while everyone is being utterly themselves; Lockwood and her husband behave like self-professed heathens, while her father and mother continue to behave firmly Catholic. “I think you have to enter into the spirit of it,” Lockwood tells me. “You go back home, and it’s a movie like Home for the Holidays and you just strap in, and go. In order to do that you do have to give up control a little bit. But that’s something I think I’m good at doing in certain circumstances. Of course, writing about it is a way to have another kind of control.”
Priestdaddy was finished a year before the election. Lockwood is sure that the memoir would have been very different had she written it during our current times. But “I don’t know if it would be as good,” she says. “I don’t know if it would get to the humanity of them as well — cause you are, I mean, you are dealing with human beings.
“But in a way, I am happy that I wrote it before all this went down because you can look at those things foreignly. There can be a sort of nostalgia looking back [at] it. Whereas now, it feels so urgent to excise all these conservative forms of thought as opposed to just seeing them as quirks — which they’re not just quirks, but they are that, especially when it’s your family.” She adds, “I always had the sense that running alongside this book was a book that was much angrier, or was expressed more as a sort of haranguing monologue against various things, but that’s not particularly natural to me as a writer.”
What is natural to Lockwood is a kind of glimmering comedy where the heaven and earth of the low passions and impropriety meet English Literature. She describes some church-goers as “square-faced and blue eyed and gently brimming with pie filling,” who harbor a passion for fabric-appliqué banners that impinges on the “erotic,” noting they are never happier than when “scissoring big purple grapes out of felt and gluing them onto their felt.” Use of scissoring here, of course, is part of the kind of subliminal wordplay abound in the book. In a favorite passage, as Lockwood worries about whether her husband’s eye surgery will restore his eyesight, she wonders if one day she’ll have to be his eyes, and practices by describing a nearby perfume ad:
The horse is an erotic moonbeam, trampling across the shore of infinity. He’s eating the woman’s neck with arousal. She smells so good that the horse thinks he is a man. He wants to conceive a pearl with her and watch her give birth to it in the sea.
I interpret her humor as a sort of family heirloom. For one, there is her mother’s endless interest in questionable crime stories: “Who would have thought that a hug could be so deadly?” she muses, when reporting to the family on the death of a child who was smothered to death on his own teddy bear. Throughout the memoir, Lockwood’s mother is like a hilarious news ticker sharing stories about the incoming threat of demonic rosaries made in China, Satanism on the rise in Italy, and a new kind of diarrhea that is killing senior citizens.
Lockwood thinks the family humor was formed in response to what she describes as her father’s blusteriness, and it is something she shares with her siblings and mother. “Maybe that’s just family language. You create a language, and I think in a larger family it becomes a very close-knit and more complex language.”
Probably the most original part of Lockwood’s voice has to do with her inhabiting the language of the church, as a feminist and lover of tarot cards. She is as much a contrarian as her father, whose opinions are so full of opinion you cannot do anything else but appreciate them. There are, for example, his notions about cats. Lockwood writes:
My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be mean little hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun.
Cannon Choir-dress illustration. Wikimedia Commons.
“It’s too funny, I mean,” Lockwood says, leaning forward over the little café table. “My dad is from that generation of dudes that when he was driving he would, like, look to the kids in the back and purposefully swerve to the side of the road if we saw something cute to freak us out and be like, ‘Haha, I’m going to kill it!’ It’s very hard to understand that mindset. For him, having a cat was the greatest outward sign of liberalism that a person can exhibit. So growing up it was like, You know, if you have cats you’re a pussy, basically, and in the most pontifical terms. And if you have a dog you’re a Republican! It makes no sense!”
Even though most consider Patricia Lockwood a funny writer, she thinks of herself as quite grave. “When I think about just being in a room alone and letting out a breath and putting my pen down, I think of myself as writing something serious.” Just so you don’t think Priestdaddy is all fluff and fun, there are also chapters devoted to child abuse in the church, as well as what it was like to be part of the early pro-life movement. Talking about the legacy of Catholicism, Lockwood says: “You can cherish the cultural things, but then there were the institutional things. You have to make peace between the culture that feels like you, and the institution which is your oppressor—in many cases the absolute enemy and the instrument of a great deal of evil.”
“A writer has a job to do,” she concludes. “And I don’t think we can do that job and get to be considered pure ethical beings. Sometimes it’s messy to write and you have to deal with that.”
At the center of this memoir is a father and a daughter, the patriarch and the feminist, and how these two opposites meet — and perhaps here lies the secret of the living nature of family. In contrarianism, there is a zenith where all can meet as equals.
‘Priestdaddy’ is out now from Riverhead Books.
Lawrence poet Patricia Lockwood is a bonafide & hilarious memoirist in ‘Priestdaddy’
By Anne Kniggendorf
Special to The Star
May 13, 2017 08:00 AM
Updated May 13, 2017 07:00 AM
Poet Patricia Lockwood has written a mother/daughter love story and called it “Priestdaddy.”
The memoir includes her father, but he’s more of a presiding, honorary character than the meat and bones of the manuscript — kind of like God’s role in the Bible. Except that the Bible’s title isn’t “God.”
What’s glorious in her writing has little to do with her father and everything to do with her fascinating mother and the way Lockwood’s relationship with her matures.
But first about the Priestdaddy.
Lockwood’s father is a Catholic priest — and from this account there’s no denying that someone needed to put him in a book. Her depiction of him is a stunningly hysterical portrait of a man who received special ordination permission from the pope because he was married before he heard the call.
The author — who lives in Lawrence and is known as the “poet laureate of Twitter” (she has more than 65,000 followers) and the author of the viral poem “Rape Joke” and two collections of poetry — and her husband have hit tough times and have to move in with her parents.
Living under their roof again inspires her to begin recording the experience.
Greg Lockwood, who presides over a church in Waldo, was a staunch atheist for much of his life. At 18, he married Lockwood’s mother, Karen, who was a devout Catholic. Lockwood quotes her mother as saying, “but I knew I would make him a Catholic eventually, because the really bad ones always convert sooner or later.”
But “The Exorcist” really showed him the light.
While he was serving on a Navy submarine, he and his shipmates watched “The Exorcist” 72 times. “All around him men in sailor suits were getting the bejesus scared out of them, and the bejesus flew into my father like a dart into a bull’s-eye,” Lockwood writes.
We also learn that at home he wears only underwear; his children see him in full priest regalia or stripped down to nothing. No in-between.
When Lockwood’s internet boyfriend (her eventual husband) comes to spirit her away at age 19, she goes.
“When we came home later, my father was wearing his most transparent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Bailey’s Irish Cream liqueur out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken.”
He’s also a conservative Republican, screams during televised sports, plays a wild electric guitar, does not support feminism in any form in spite of having three daughters and a wife, and doesn’t help any of his five children go to college.
So mostly, Daddy is a character, maybe a celestial being, whom his daughter understands only through his effect on others.
Her mother is the down-to-earth constant.
“You love your mother most when you’re hip-height and can still hide in her skirts,” Lockwood writes in a chapter titled “Abortion Barbie,” about her childhood involvement in picketing a Planned Parenthood clinic.
What Lockwood has set down on paper isn’t necessarily what she means — one of the charms of prose written by a poet.
She shows us that you love your mother best when you’re an adult who sees your mother’s life as it is, and as it has been since before you were born. You love your mother most when you really see the person she has been married to all these years and understand her role in that relationship.
This book shines brightest not when Lockwood is parsing through hurtful or odd interactions with her father, but when she dramatizes scenes with her mother or sisters.
At right about the halfway point in the memoir — where the climax of a book normally occurs — she and her mother are at a hotel and find bodily fluid on their sheets. They’re traveling from Kansas City to Savannah, Ga., to collect some books from a storage unit.
Lockwood and her mother tussle about who will touch the substance to verify its suspected identity.
Mom wants to know how long such a fluid stays alive. Lockwood gets on the internet and finds: “Sperm either die shortly after they leave the body, or they live eternally, first on earth and then in heaven, banging themselves adoringly against the great gold egg of God’s face. No one can decide.”
Lockwood, who is famously potty-mouthed, strings together one brilliant piece of dialogue after another until she and her mother converge into a single, nasty vocab list.
“I have gazed into a puddle of genetic matter and seen my own DNA. We are more related than we’ve ever been. … We join hands and set forth into the morning, united by that human glue which cannot be dissolved.”
This memoir not only asks “who am I?” but deftly asks and answers “who are they?” about her family.
In poetic fashion, she writes: “… you enter the country, the state, the city, and finally the little four-cornered house, and finally your mother’s body, and finally your own.”
“Priestdaddy,” by Patricia Lockwood (352 pages; Riverhead Books; $27)
Patricia Lockwood Is a Priest’s Child (Really), but ‘From the Devil’
Books of The Times
By DWIGHT GARNER MAY 3, 2017
Photo
Patricia Lockwood Credit Grep Hoax
PRIESTDADDY
By Patricia Lockwood
336 pages. Riverhead Books. $27.
Pauline Kael despised the film version of “The Exorcist” — she thought it was a shallow, tendentious gross-out. But writing in The New Yorker in 1974, she did call it “the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had since the sunnier days of ‘Going My Way’ and ‘The Bells of St. Mary’s.’”
Among those “The Exorcist” scared witless was Greg Lockwood, the father of the poet Patricia Lockwood. He was a Navy man in the mid-1970s. He first saw the movie while sealed in a nuclear submarine. There was not enough room for him to leap out of his own skin. A Lutheran, he experienced what he would call “the deepest conversion on record.”
In her candy-colored new memoir, “Priestdaddy,” Patricia Lockwood describes her father’s conversion this way:
“Put yourself in his place. You’re a drop of blood at the center of the ocean, which plays a tense soundtrack all night long, interspersed with bright blips of radar. Russians are trying to blow up capitalism and you’re surrounded by dolphins who know how to spy and the general atmosphere is one of cinematic suspense.
“All of the sudden you look up at a screen and see a possessed 12-year-old with violent bedhead vomiting green chunks and backwards Latin. She’s so full of a demon that the only way to relieve her feelings is to have hate sex with a crucifix. You would convert too, I guarantee it.”
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These sentences are prime examples of Lockwood’s looping and elastic style. She injects whimsical imagery (spying dolphins, “violent bedhead”) into weightier reveries in a manner that can make your head, like the unlucky little girl’s in “The Exorcist,” perform what in ice skating they call a double axel.
Lockwood’s prose is cute and dirty and innocent and experienced, Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris. When her stuff is good, it is very good. Witness her poem “Rape Joke,” which put her on the map, and much of the other verse in her sexy and endearing bummer of a collection, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals” (2014).
When her attention drifts, as it sometimes does in her memoir, the kookiness wears. Each sentence is its own quirky cameo appearance. Lockwood is a one-woman cupcake factory, and nothing is coming out of the kitchen unless it has sprinkles, curls, powdered sugar and, lastly, a filthy word piped onto the top.
Photo
Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times
The good news about “Priestdaddy” is that it roars from the gate. Its first third is electric. It’s not just that Lockwood has fresh eyes and quick wits, but that in her father she’s lucked upon one of the great characters of this nonfiction decade.
Greg Lockwood is no typical Catholic priest. He’s a big bear of a man, fond of guns, cream liqueurs, pork rinds and flatulence as a conversational gambit. When the mood strikes him, he pulls out his red guitar and begins to make an inchoate noise that his daughter likens to “a whole band dying in a plane crash in the year 1972.”
The author is present on this planet (she calls herself “a human loophole”) thanks to the fact that when her father converted to Catholicism, he was already a married Lutheran minister. He received a dispensation from Rome to become that rarity, a married Catholic priest. During his daughter’s youth, he presided over churches in what she calls, in a biographical note, “all the worst cities of the Midwest.”
Greg Lockwood comes off, in his daughter’s telling, as something like a right-wing, pulpit-thumping version of Ignatius Reilly, the antihero of John Kennedy Toole’s novel “A Confederacy of Dunces” (1980).
Walker Percy described Ignatius as a “slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one.” That’s not a bad description of Greg.
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He listens to Rush Limbaugh while watching Bill O’Reilly. He consumes Arby’s Beef ’n Cheddar sandwiches the way other humans consume cashews. He strides around in his underwear. He thunders about “feminazis.”
When his daughter gets a poem published in The New Yorker, he declares, bizarrely, that it was “part of The New Yorker’s mission to abolish age-of-consent laws.”
Lockwood manages to make her father not only more complicated than he seems, but also oddly lovable in his lurching way. She writes sensitively about coming of age — as a woman, and as a poet — under the Joe Cocker-meets-John Goodman rainstorm of his persona.
“When the patriarch of your family is a priest,” she writes, “it can be difficult to tell what is church and what is not.” Part of the story this book tells is of her gradual break from the church, her awareness that she is, as she puts it, “from the devil.”
There is lovely writing in “Priestdaddy” about social class. There was no money for the author or her sister to attend college. They tended to live near polluted rivers.
“A beautiful backdrop is an aesthetic luxury, same as shelves of books and music lessons and trips to museums on weekends,” she writes. “It is green, green money to roll in.” In its scrutiny of life outside America’s elite culture, this book can be read as a flyway companion volume to J. D. Vance’s best seller “Hillbilly Elegy” (2016).
Other good stories are told in “Priestdaddy,” including the author’s decision to run away from home at 19 with a man she’d met on the internet. (They were discussing poetry.) When he got sick and they ran out of money, they moved back in with Patricia’s parents. They remain married.
By its midpoint, however, “Priestdaddy” has begun to drift. Greg Lockwood mostly falls out of the story. The author no longer seems sure where her book is heading. Some of the scenes that feature the author’s combative mother have a tinny, cartoonish ring. This memoir limps home.
Serious incidents (a rape, a suicide attempt) flicker past too quickly. There’s a sense the author is not making things hard enough for herself, or for us. A lot is being swept under a colorful rug.
“Priestdaddy” is consistently alive with feeling, however, and I suspect it may mean a lot to many people, especially the lapsed Catholics among us. It is, for sure, like no book I have read. The Bible tells us to forgive our enemies, not our families.
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner
A version of this review appears in print on May 4, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Priest’s Child (Really), ‘From the Devil’. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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A Poet’s Loving Take on Her Unorthodox Catholic Family
By GEMMA SIEFFJUNE 9, 2017
Photo
Patricia Lockwood, in a portrait taken for her first communion. Credit Family photograph
(This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017. For the rest of the list, click here.)
In his poem “The Novelist,” W. H. Auden separates the poet’s “boyish gift” from the novelist’s duty to “become the whole of boredom” and suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.” The poet is “encased in talent like a uniform” and “can amaze us like a thunderstorm, / Or die so young, or live for years alone” — dazzling, romantic, dramatic, his words snug as a tin of sardines, and similarly pungent. The novelist’s gift is to spread sardines on toast. He must nourish his reader over hundreds of pages, and one can’t guzzle high-octane fuel the whole journey. Rare is the writer whose gifts naturally span both of these categories. In her first work of prose, “Priestdaddy,” the poet Patricia Lockwood proves herself a formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.
Lockwood has written two collections of poetry, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black” (2012) and “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals” (2014), and amassed a cult following on Twitter for verses that, among other things, convert sexting into high art, marrying the sacred and the profane to lushly amusing effect. She married young and lived all over the country — in Hebron, Ky.; Keene, N.H.; Colorado Springs; Stuart, Fla.; and Savannah, Ga. She got and dropped a day job as a waitress, succumbing to the mantle of Writer with unfussy integrity: She skipped college and the M.F.A. scene, simply stayed home and wrote. The course of her life so far has been rather like a raindrop wending its way down a pane of glass: unstructured, stop-start and pellucid.
“Priestdaddy,” a memoir, tells the story of the nine-month stint Lockwood and her husband spent living under her parents’ rectory roof. What the secular culture might fashion a defeat — impractical millennial and her vision-impaired spouse boomerang home to recuperate rent-free — Lockwood lives as a retreat, and really makes the most of it. As a teenager, she joined a Christian youth group called God’s Gang. “When I was 17, and nearing the beginning of the madness that would carry me away from singing and God’s Gang and that neighborhood that had such a grip on us, I went to visit the Carmelites, one of the last cloistered orders. … I imagined the nuns ate penny-tasting lentils and coarse bread for dinner, sitting together at long knotholed tables, while prayers bumped gently at the ceilings of their heads like loosed helium balloons. They were called contemplatives for a reason.” Instead, she becomes a writer, whose seclusion is at once lonelier and more free. And when she moves home in her early 30s, seeing her parents with fresh eyes occasions the opportunity to capture their mannerisms in real time, and to recount their pasts and her own.
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The Lockwoods are the exception to Tolstoy’s rule about happy families: They are, for the most part, a happy bunch, but happy in a way that is all their own. Lockwood’s father, Greg, is also Father Greg, a Catholic priest with a large family, which makes him a walking oxymoron. An atheist until the Navy, he found God in a submarine. On dry land, he became a Lutheran minister, overseeing a flock of people with a fondness for bright felt banners and mayonnaise. But Lutheranism is ultimately unsatisfying, and he converts to Catholicism, the religion of Lockwood’s mother, Karen. “Here is how it works: When a married minister of another faith converts … he can apply to Rome for a dispensation to become a married Catholic priest. He is allowed, yes, to keep his wife. He is even allowed to keep his children, no matter how bad they might be.” None other than Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI, gives Greg Lockwood the stamp of approval.
Photo
Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times
And so Patricia Lockwood and her siblings grow up in rectories in “all the worst cities of the Midwest.” Karen is den mother extraordinaire, tidying up after her irrepressible husband, who fries up pounds of bacon, tries to hunt deer, washes his body with dish soap, shreds his groovy red guitar, answers the door at all hours to desperate people seeking $5 and/or odd jobs, tends to the dying and the newly born, gets arrested at an abortion protest, loudly coaches action heroes on television and generally leaves a trail of blessed mess wherever he goes (“The dining room looks like a dog just opened a birthday present in it”). Of course, Karen is and does much more than a den mother, and one of the pleasures of this memoir is its particularly tender mother-daughter bond. Karen is indefatigable and largehearted, a caretaker who cooks for family, seminarians, parishioners and workers alike, and frets over their collective health. She’s also a fount of hilarity and superlative turns of phrase, which Lockwood appreciates as the antecedent to her own way with words.
Lockwood brings her “boyish gift” to bear again and again, describing the “gooseberry-green eye” of a deer in headlights; a martini so strong it tastes like being thrown through a window; “the smell of paper being pressed, a much redder smell than you might expect, a smell like canned blood”; “a diamond-patterned fence that was always sending up a ringing kennel sound where someone had shaken it”; the siren “sound of two ambulances having sex”; chalices “so crusted with ornament that they appear actually diseased, as if King Midas had contracted an S.T.D. and then foolishly touched himself.” She is a good enough writer that you forgive her the occasional kill-no-darlings indecision: “At the bottom of the pools are thousands of pebbles sparkling with velvety druzy — infinitesimal crystals that resemble pollen, or butterfly feathers, or book gilt.” Sometimes she’ll tie off sections with too Hallmark-y a bow — “Despite all the conspiracies of the universe, we are here; every moment we are here we arrive”— but for the most part, her voice is wonderfully grounded and authentic. She writes well about difficult things: abortion, the too-short life of a maintenance man named Darrell, molestation in the church.
“Priestdaddy” being in part a memoir of Catholicism, Lockwood wrings a lot of good material out of the virgin birth of Jesus — she calls Joseph “a patient shadow, cucked by God” — but it is another creation myth, Athena bursting fully formed from the dome of Zeus, that springs to mind. Owlish, fierce, preternaturally wise, her dad’s biggest headache as well as the bad apple of his eye, fallen for awhile right under the tree, Lockwood is an Athena-ish heroine. She is plucky, for her resilience and for the sounds she can make out of words.
What I loved about this book was the way it feels suffused with love — of literature, nature and the English language; for her family, those loved ones whom this book is for. “A family never recognizes its own idylls while it’s living them,” she writes, “while it’s all spread out on the red-and-white checked cloth, while the picnic basket is still open and before the ants have found the sugar. … It recognizes them later, when people are gone, or moved away, or colder toward each other. This is about that idyll, and I began it in that grass-green clearing of time, and I am giving it no chance to grow cold.” “Priestdaddy” gives “the conviction that good books sometimes give: that life can be holdable in the hand, examined down to the dog hairs, eaten with the eyes and understood.”
Gemma Sieff’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1 and Harpers, among other publications.
PRIESTDADDY
By Patricia Lockwood
336 pp. Riverhead Books. $27.
A version of this review appears in print on June 11, 2017, on Page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Holy Rollered. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/books/review/priestdaddy-patricia-lockwood-memoir.html
'Priestdaddy' Shimmers With Wonderful, Obscene Life
May 10, 20177:00 AM ET
Annalisa Quinn
Priestdaddy
Priestdaddy
by Patricia Lockwood
Hardcover, 336 pages |
purchase
"I like to think I sprang from a head; I like to think the head was mine," writes Patricia Lockwood in Priestdaddy, her memoir of growing up with a Catholic priest for a father.
But no. She sprang from the (oft-exposed) loins of Father Gregory Lockwood, who converted on board a submarine while watching the Exorcist: "That eerie, pea-soup light was pouring down, and all around him men in sailor suits were getting the bejesus scared out of them, and the bejesus flew into my father like a dart into a bull's eye."
It was, he boasted, "the deepest conversion on record." He became a Lutheran, and then a Catholic priest, keeping his wife and family through special Vatican dispensation.
Father Lockwood rarely wears pants, washes himself with dish soap, and plays the guitar like "a whole band dying in a plane crash in the year 1972." Additionally, he "despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun."
In Priestdaddy, portraits like this abound — in which each sentence shimmies with wonderful, obscene life, but the person behind it isn't quite visible through the dance. Her mother gets similar treatment: "If Daisy's voice was full of money, my mother's voice is full of coupons for free appetizers." They almost give away more about Lockwood than her subjects.
For Patricia Lockwood, the power runs one way ... conservative men controlled her childhood, and she's punching up, as hard as she can bear to.
But Priestdaddy hints, in between these wackily affectionate sections, at a darker undescribed history – "that I had been raised in an alternate reality, that my childhood sky was green." Lockwood's descriptions of trauma, a rape and a suicide attempt, for instance, are mere paragraphs, and then we return once more to the wheeling, dancing circus. She doesn't owe us these revelations, of course, but Lockwood is best when she is concrete. The force of her sentences, though stunning, is not enough to carry the family portrait past the first 150 pages.
Her writing about the Catholic Church, however, is scorching. It's been a hot topic lately, what precise degree of compassion or scorn or blame or help or whatever other cocktail of post-Trump feelings is owed to white, right-leaning Christian men. Are they oppressing minorities or, wait, are the coastal elites oppressing them? For Patricia Lockwood, the power runs one way: These conservative men controlled her childhood, and she's punching up, as hard as she can bear to.
Of the priests and seminarians who filled her childhood home, many of whom turned out to be either child molesters or their protectors, she thinks, "I had no real power; it was men like these who were in charge of my life. If they decided tomorrow I had to cover my hair or wear skirts or pray separately, or be barred from reading certain books, or take certain pills and not take others, or be silent in the presence of men, I would have to do it."
At her very best, Lockwood is antic, deadpan, heartbreaking — and so, so gross.
The day she publishes her throat-punch of a poem "Rape Joke," she overhears her father and a seminarian talking about another priest caught kissing a 14-year-old girl: "'She shouldn't have put him in that position,' I hear a male voice say, and an old familiar wildness flutters up in my chest and into my throat, sending feathers and flames into my voice box until I cannot speak, that same phoenix heat that still rises up in me no matter how many times I force it down."
Passages like these are searing and true, while the quirky family anecdotes begin to seem repetitive after a time. Lockwood shines when covering specific events: her other big piece of nonfiction, some reporting for the New Republic on a Donald Trump rally, has the same sensibility with a more defined target. At one point in Priestdaddy, she describes an idea as "exact change in the form of a concept," and that's the way her best phrases feel: In the New Republic piece, Melania "wore an outfit best described as Sensual Band-Aid and took small, ruthlessly edited steps."
A few days after the story came out, the New Republic briefly let her run their Twitter account, which she used to tweet "f— me daddy" at Trump There she is: the flasher under the poet's robes. At her very best, Lockwood is antic, deadpan, heartbreaking — and so, so gross.
Patricia Lockwood's memoir, 'Priestdaddy,' is smart, funny and irreverent
Kathleen RooneyChicago Tribune
Last summer, the Pew Research Center released a study showing that for the first time, more 18- to 34-year-olds live at home with their parents than in any other arrangement.
So Patricia Lockwood's decision to move with her husband, in the face of medical and financial hardship, back in with her parents in Kansas City "after twelve long years away" is hardly exceptional unto itself. No, what makes it exceptional is that they are throwing themselves "on the mercy of the church," which Lockwood explains in her delightful and debauched prose debut, the memoir "Priestdaddy," "exists for me on this earth in unusually patriarchal form." This is because her father, Greg Lockwood, is one of a small and little-known number of married Catholic priests.
As Lockwood explains, if a married minister of another faith "converts to Catholicism, he can apply to Rome for a dispensation," which, if granted, means, "He is allowed, yes, to keep his wife. He is even allowed to keep his children, no matter how bad they might be." Because her dad became a Catholic after having been a Lutheran minister, his paperwork was approved by Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), permitting him the right to work as a priest free of the requirement of clerical celibacy.
Author of the acclaimed poetry collection "Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals," Lockwood has been hailed by The New Yorker as "the poet laureate of Twitter," where she has more than 64,000 followers. The New York Times has dubbed her the "smutty-metaphor queen," and she is deservingly renowned for her boundary-pushing wit and smutty apercus.
Here, using the same offbeat intelligence, comic timing, gimlet skill for observation and verbal dexterity that she uses in both her poetry and her tweets, she delivers an unsparing yet ultimately affectionate portrait of faith and family. And her metaphors really are deserving of royalty status, as when she tries to capture her beloved sister, Mary, saying, "I have, on different occasions … described her as 'a tricked-out club Chewbacca,' a 'highly literate female Tarzan,' and 'a jaguar who went through a human puberty.' "
Describing the Lutherans of her father's first flock with characteristic irreverent incisiveness, she writes, "If Jesus himself appeared in their midst and said, 'Eat my body,' they would first slather mayonnaise all over him." The frequency of her jokes and the grotesqueness of her hilarity lead to a high density of pleasure; virtually every page is packed with the potential to make the reader laugh out loud.
Author Patricia Lockwood
Author Patricia Lockwood (Grep Hoax)
Yet even as "Priestdaddy" is a book of leisure, capable of entertaining the heck out of you and letting you escape from your own life, so too is it a book that has something to teach you — with real pathos.
Some comedians get nervous if too many minutes go by without a laugh, cracking jokes neurotically whether the gags are necessary or not. Lockwood's jokes, though, seem neither defensive nor compulsive. Rather, they deliver something essential to the voice, character and content of her story. Moreover, she can get deadly serious when the subject merits gravity, as when she writes about the child sex abuse scandals that began to rock the Catholic church in the early 2000s.
After a raucous recounting of a celebratory dinner that she and her family attended that was presided over by Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn, who would later be forced to resign by Pope Francis for his role in shielding pedophile priests, she writes: "All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. … The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape."
Impressive in its amplitude — ranging from Lockwood's own coming of age as a poet and feminist to her exchanging sexual information with the seminarian also living in her family's rectory, from her husband's eye surgery to her father's getting arrested at an abortion clinic sit-in — "Priestdaddy" gives both believers and nonbelievers a great deal to contemplate. "The air of a subculture is a different air," she notes. "It is harder to breathe, but it gives purpose to every part of you, to every cell."
Frequently at odds though she is with the strict and restrictive worldview in which she was raised, Lockwood nevertheless concludes that "faith and my father taught me the same lesson: to live in the mystery, even to love it." In this memoir, she practically dares the reader not to do the same.
Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novel "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk."
'Priestdaddy'
By Patricia Lockwood, Riverhead, 352 pages, $27
Books becoming movies in 2018
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood review – a dazzling comic memoir
The American poet goes for laughs in recounting her midwest Catholic upbringing, complete with anti-abortion rallies and virginity pledges
Paul Laity
@paullaity
Thu 27 Apr 2017 02.30 EDT
Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 04.41 EST
Patricia Lockwood
“My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur.” Patricia Lockwood’s dazzling comic memoir is set in midwest America and centres on a man who likes to clean his gun, listen to Rush Limbaugh and drink from a mug that reads “I love my ‘white-collar’ job” – despite being married with five children, he is a Catholic priest. Father Lockwood, as presented here, is a truly unusual man. Upstairs in the family home, he shreds his electric guitar in a prog-rock frenzy and sips cream liqueurs (“He looked like a gigantic brownie drinking drops of dew”). He has a habit of yelling out “Hoooo-eee” for no particular reason, cooks a great deal of meat and dresses either in his full priestly regalia or nothing but his underwear (“He was wearing his most formal boxer shorts, the ones you could almost not see through”).
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When Patricia was 19, in 2002, she met her future husband Jason on an internet poetry forum. She was living at home – her father, a “loose, lazy pile of carnality”, was happy to spend money on himself but unable to fund his children through college. After months of exchanged messages, Jason drove from Colorado to Missouri finally to meet her. He half-assumed she would be “fifty years old and Latina”; Lockwood in turn was worried that poets “were the sort of people who said ‘lo’ in conversation”. Her parents were naturally wary of the stranger, and Jason was greeted by her father with the screech: “Gimme your license. I got cop friends.” Though an immediate marriage proposal took place – “in the parking lot of … the most matrimonial of all grocery stores” – her mother and father were convinced Tricia was about to drive off with a murderer. It was her sister Mary who pointed out that “We are the ones who are not normal”.
The outline of Lockwood’s family story has been known since she was interviewed in the aftermath of “Rape Joke”, her autobiographical poem that, when published in 2013, instantly found a vast online audience. She was at that time already “indie-poetry royalty”, in the phrase of the New York Times, thanks to her first collection of poems, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, and was celebrated too for her “sexts” on Twitter. (Here are three, from 2011-13: “Sext: Botany Class. I do leaf rubbing after leaf rubbing until the teacher kicks me out for Moaning too much”; “Sext: I am a water glass at the Inquisition. You are a dry pope mouth. You pucker; I wet you”; “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’”.) Called, perhaps too often, the poet laureate of Twitter, she drily notes in Priestdaddy that it took the social-media commotion attendant on “Rape Joke” for mainstream publishers to come calling: the poem was the centrepiece of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, her second collection, which showcased what the Atlantic magazine has described as her “witty, sexually slippery, polymorphous and Millennially mischievous” work.
The writing of a memoir was prompted by Lockwood’s return, complete with husband and cat, and after 12 years away, to live with her parents, “penniless, exhausted”. Jason was an editor on a small newspaper, who believed he was “destined to be a sort of Leonard Woolf figure”; the couple accepted their “pinched circumstances”. When Jason developed a rare eye condition, and they had to raise $10,000 for treatment, Lockwood appealed to her Twitter followers and the money was collected within a day. But the operation went wrong; Jason needed further procedures, and could no longer work. Their only option was a room in the rectory (a sign outside the house reads “God answers knee-mail”). During their nine-month stay, Lockwood finds herself “jotting down everything everyone says, as fast and free as it comes out of their mouths”. Her mother rises “to heights of quotability exceeded only by Confucius, Muhammad Ali”; her father shouts at the TV “I like Chunky Soup … oh yeah”.
Rape Joke: what is Patricia Lockwood's poem really saying?
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The New Yorker has described Lockwood as “an exemplar of brilliant silliness”, and Priestdaddy is indeed brilliantly silly, with much comedy squeezed out of her Catholic upbringing. (Rumours of Satanists are rife, and new religious robes incite the comment: “The embroidery! Do you see the detail on those lambs!”) But the book strikes other notes. It would have been impossible not to address the church’s record on child sexual abuse, especially when “the topic of which priests had been removed from their parishes … was discussed over the dinner table”; the “code of silence” exerted a great power. She reveals that, as a 16-year-old, she took 100 painkiller tablets and had to have her stomach pumped (“Sex would probably have helped,” she says of her teenage angst, “but the only thing I was having sex with then was the intolerable sadness of the human condition, which sucked so much in bed”). Between the jokes, there is a fleeting mention of her “childlessness”.
Lockwood’s father was an atheist when he married her mother. He converted when he was working as a naval seaman, serving on a nuclear submarine, and the family legend is that it was due to multiple underwater screenings of The Exorcist: “that eerie, pea-soup light was pouring down, and all around him men in sailor suits were getting the bejesus scared out of them, and the bejesus flew into my father like a dart into a bull’s eye”. Gregory Lockwood dubbed it “the deepest conversion on record”. He became a Lutheran pastor, but later presented himself for ordination as a married Catholic priest, which required a special dispensation from the pope. In due time, he made his terrorised children watch The Exorcist as a “tender rite of passage”: “My father attempted to mute the line ‘Your mother sucks cocks in hell!’ but hit the wrong button on the remote and actually ended up blasting it at maximum volume.”
Lockwood grew up with pro-life bumper stickers on the family car; she was taken by her parents to anti-abortion rallies. During her early teenage years, she attended a religious youth group called God’s Gang, where they spoke in tongues, were told in detail about the sex they shouldn’t have, and sang such refrains as “He’s a peach of a saviour /He’s the apple of my eyes … And that’s why I’m bananas for the Lord!” She carried a card inscribed with the virginity pledge “True Love Waits”, and didn’t disclose that she had already lost her hymen (she called it her “herman”) when she hit the water after jumping off a high diving board: “Suddenly I felt romantic towards the aqua-blue water. I scissored through it in languid strokes and pictured the baby we might make together.”
Priestdaddy is a haphazard coming-of-age story, but also an account of a writer forming a highly individual worldview
Priestdaddy is a haphazard coming-of-age story, but also an account of a writer forming a highly individual worldview, and finding an audience. Lockwood describes the composing of “Rape Joke” – “It came all at once … Beads along a razor blade, but now I controlled the cut”. The poem recalls an incident from her late teens: “The rape joke is that you were 19 years old. / The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend. / The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.” Having been told about the rape, her priestdaddy made the sign of the cross over her head and absolved her of her sins. Lockwood’s poems often explore the objectification of, and violence against, women. In this memoir, which depicts her charismatic, dominating father with no malice, she notes: “I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn’t work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome.”
In the section entitled “The Cum Queens of Hyatt Place”, Lockwood recounts a trip she makes with her mother, who, on arriving for the first time in a hotel room, finds semen stains on the sheets: “This is a Catholic’s worst nightmare, souls all over the bed.” They wonder who was responsible. “I think it was probably a businessman,” Lockwood remarks, “with a hotel fetish, who shouted the word ‘amenities!’ as he came.” Her mother responds, without a pause: “A jizzness man, you mean.” Karen Lockwood, it turns out, understands “Pun Lightning, that jolt of connection”, and Priestdaddy becomes in one sense a tribute to her, both as an endless resource of love and care, and an intellectual kindred spirit.
At the end of the book, Patricia and Jason have moved out of the rectory, and everything is more possible, less desperate. On a cherished holiday in Key West, Florida, Lockwood looks back, in a fine sentence, to previous stays there: “Next to the sea we were submerged, and what we said in the middle of the night did not matter, it was just breathing … silvery bubbles that wobbled up through the depths.” But family remains closer than it was, and on this vacation her mother is with them, liberated for a while from her crazed home and husband. Happy and full of champagne, she drunkenly proclaims – as her daughter undoubtedly would – “I love language”.
• Priestdaddy is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Patricia Lockwood likes to write in bed. 'Priestdaddy' is her memoir
By Kate Tuttle
Apr 28, 2017 | 8:00 AM
Patricia Lockwood likes to write in bed. 'Priestdaddy' is her memoir
In Patricia Lockwood's memoir "Priestdaddy," the poet writes about returning to live with her parents. Her father is a Catholic priest. (Grep Hoax; Riverhead Books)
Patricia Lockwood became a famous poet on the Internet, a statement that raises many questions: Is "famous poet" even a thing? Isn't poetry a stodgy and dignified endeavor, more suited to print magazines like the New Yorker than ephemeral, frivolous spaces like Twitter? And how was it that some of the smartest, most original poetry was being written by the daughter of a Catholic priest, a woman who never went to college, married at 21, and does her writing from bed in Savannah, Ga.?
"I don't conceive of myself now as a person of brains," says Lockwood over a glass of wine in the Grey, a restaurant that was once Savannah's bus station. "I think of myself as a person with a knack for metaphor. I think of myself as a person with the twist or the torque, that's that little thing that some people have."
Starting in 2011, her beguiling, off-kilter sext-like tweets made her a star on social media, such as I teach an African Grey Parrot to sext. He sexts at the level of a two-year-old -- "mama, mama, mama."
Lockwood's first book of poetry ("Balloon Pop Outlaw Black") came out in 2012; that same year, a poem of hers appeared in the New Yorker. But it was 2013's "Rape Joke," published online in the Awl, that made Lockwood's name. At a time when women were increasingly sharing their stories of rape and sexual assault, against a backdrop of anti-feminist backlash (especially among some in the comedy world, who vehemently defended rape jokes), Lockwood's searing autobiographical poem stood out for its brilliance, its rage and its wit. The poem "Rape Joke," it has to be said, is both sadder and far funnier than any comedian's rape joke. (A second collection, "Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals," was published in 2014 by Penguin.)
In her new memoir, "Priestdaddy" (Riverhead: 352 pp., $27), Lockwood writes about returning to live with her parents after she and her husband face unexpected medical bills. Multi-generational households are always complex, but this one was especially so, because Greg Lockwood, in addition to being a husband and father of five, is also a Catholic priest. A "human loophole," his daughter writes, he was a Lutheran minister who'd already had a family when he received special permission from the Catholic Church to be ordained after he converted. The two couples also share space with a young seminarian, who is studying for the priesthood under Greg's tutelage.
For a daughter whose religious and political views have diverged from those of her parents, going home again was uncomfortable at times. But for a writer whose preoccupations have often included sex and absurdity, it provided a lot of material. "There's this guy across the hall, who's like about to make a vow to never have sex for the rest of his life," Lockwood says. "And my dad's constantly playing the electric guitar, in his underwear."
"Priestdaddy" mines Lockwood's unusual childhood and family. There's her father, born into privilege and touched by "congenital naughtiness," now of Christ the King Parish in Kansas City, Mo., who despite his unorthodox marital status and hobbies is nevertheless an extreme traditionalist. "He believes that no other priest should be married," Lockwood tells me. "He's moved to a position that's very, very pro-homeschooling. It feels a lot more extreme than it felt when I was young." She grew up attending anti-abortion rallies with her mother, Karen, who brought her along until it became clear how much they terrified Patricia.
In person, Lockwood, 34, is very funny but also grave, her conversation as bold and disarming as an adult version of Eloise. Sitting in a back booth at the Grey, Lockwood is a bit tired and pale — "I look like sin and the pit right now," she says — she's been fighting the flu. The discussion ranges from the boyish earnestness of cocktail culture to whether or not antibiotics make alcohol more potent to why someone should launch a restaurant that serves nothing but round food (meatballs, croquettes, arancini) and call it Balls. She is effortlessly charming, but having grown up with an extremely charismatic father, she sometimes works to control that quality in herself. She worries, she says, about being too glib, too much of a performer.
"Honestly, the chapters I had the most difficulty with in the book were the ones where I thought I might be treating some subject or some person with superficiality [when] I would want to go deeper," she says. "It never felt to me that it would be honest to either just write a serious, very straightforward book, or something that was just comedy set pieces. It seemed like you'd have to include both things. But then you don't know whether you've struck the right balance."
Lockwood and her siblings developed their fierce sense of humor "as a sort of armor," she says, "a front line of defense against what was basically an unreasonable atmosphere." Her father, she says, "sucked up all the oxygen — he was a big screamer too, and very impulsive." It's a complicated relationship, and one that Lockwood says she's found difficult at times to write about. "You can't just write a funny book about it, even if your dad is this sort of larger-than-life, Toad of Toad Hall character, which is probably his only analog in literature." The humor is obvious ("he generally does not wear pants"), but so is the pain (in "Rape Joke," he treats his daughter, who's just told him she's been raped, as if she were a sinner in need of absolution). Of this book, Lockwood says, "I don't think he'll read it, but I think to a certain extent he feels like he's the sort of person who should have a book written about him."
Her father's mistrust of college discouraged her; she never went. Like a lot of autodidacts, Lockwood talks about reading and books and ideas in a more interesting way than one encounters in the classroom. Her literary enthusiasms span high and low. "I love to read addiction memoirs," she says. "I love reading heroin memoirs, for some reason. I always like to understand how people organize their days. Is spending a day with your heroin stash really that different from me, crouching in my bed surrounded by piles of books?"
And yes, Lockwood writes in bed. "It's so lazy! But the less I move, the more I can think," she says. "I always wish I were one of those perambulatory writers like Wallace Stevens."
Perambulation sounds like a good idea; the interview flows out of the restaurant and into downtown Savannah, where Lockwood and Kendall eventually returned, after eight months living with her parents and an additional two years in Lawrence, Kan. It continues past fountains and statues and monuments to Civil War heroes and villains. It ends in the small patio behind Lockwood and Kendall's apartment, where an outside cat named Princess Fuzzypants taunts the three inside cats, who glare at her.
Lockwood and Kendall are both tall and attractive; Kendall’s mother has told them they should be “couple models,” Lockwood crows, “like that’s a thing!” It’s clear the pair, who met in an online forum discussing poetry and have been married more than a dozen years, enjoy each other immensely. They recall the events described in the book’s trippiest chapter, about a drunken evening fueled by martinis that Kendall mixed up “according to Julia Child’s recipe.” They were the strongest martinis Lockwood ever tasted; “like a house that’s bigger on the inside than the outside — that martini had more alcohol than the glass actually held!”
Both agree that despite the priest's big personality ("a true eccentric," Kendall says, putting it mildly), it's Lockwood's mother who emerges as the book's star. While on a road trip together, Karen asks her daughter how it feels to write poetry. Lockwood writes about her mother's shy question about where that gift came from: "You know, your dad thinks he's the reason…" she tells Lockwood. "He doesn't think that I could ever…."
This is crazy, Lockwood tells me. "She has more of the twist than anyone."
Both Lockwood and Kendall worried about how Karen would feel about the book. "It's hard to be written about. It's hard to be a character in somebody else's story," says Kendall.
"She was worried about it; my older sister was worried about it," Lockwood says, "but I was like, 'Mom, don't worry, everyone who's read the book thinks you're really the heart of it. You're the centerpiece of it.' "
Tuttle is the president of the National Book Critics Circle.
Bible Study in the Basement
Namara Smith
Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood
Allen Lane, 333 pp, £14.99, May 2017, ISBN 978 1 84614 920 7
In 2012, Daniel Tosh, known for joking about dead babies and the Holocaust, was performing a stand-up routine about sexual assault when he was heckled by a woman in the audience. ‘Rape jokes are never funny,’ she called out. Tosh allegedly responded: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like, five guys right now?’ The exchange went viral, and the question of whether rape could ever be comic material and who had the right to joke about such things was debated on the internet for months. Patricia Lockwood’s contribution to this debate, perhaps the only poem (so far) inspired by a social media controversy, was published in the online magazine the Awl in 2013. At the time, Lockwood, whose first poetry collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, had come out from an independent press the year before, was mostly known for the surreal and obscene messages she posted on her Twitter account. ‘Rape Joke’ was a characteristically sly mixture of personal confession and political confrontation. It began, like many of Lockwood’s poems, by personifying an abstraction, imagining a rape joke looking at itself in the mirror and grooming its goatee to look more like a rape joke. Within a few lines, it becomes clear that what you are reading is a description of the writer’s rape by her boyfriend when she was 19.
Part of what immediately attracted attention to ‘Rape Joke’ was that it was impossible to determine which side Lockwood was on: was it a rape joke or was it aimed at men who made misogynistic rape jokes? Although Lockwood largely avoided graphic detail, the poem, with its repetitive, incantatory form (‘The rape joke is … The rape joke is …’), was recognisably online confessional writing. Yet unlike most narratives of sexual assault, which stick closely to the scene of trauma, ‘Rape Joke’ moved outward. Her boyfriend had been a student in her father’s World Religion class in Cincinnati. He was seven years older than she was. On dates, they used to go to his best friend’s house and watch wrestling. He had a shelf of serial killer paperbacks, which she took as a sign of an interest in history. The day after he raped her she laughed about it as if nothing had happened but replayed the experience in her mind for years. When she told her parents, her father made the sign of the cross over her and absolved her of her sins. The poem’s humour and its pain both come from the gap between the rape itself and the attempts to respond to it. The last lines of the poem push it into the realm of the absurd:
The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.
Within hours of its publication, ‘Rape Joke’ had been shared tens of thousands of times. Lockwood was praised for having ‘casually reawakened a generation’s interest in poetry’, and her next collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014), was reviewed in the New York Times. Her memoir returns to this autobiographical terrain. Its title is a reference to her father, a married Lutheran minister who converted to Catholicism and was ordained as a Catholic priest when she was a child. A series of loosely joined essays, the book begins in 2012 with a medical crisis – Lockwood’s husband develops cataracts, forcing them to move in with her parents in Missouri for nine months – and moves back and forth between her memories of growing up a priest’s daughter and an account of returning to her family home as an adult.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to write about your family without mythologising them. Rather than struggling against this impulse, Lockwood amplifies it. In Priestdaddy, her parents emerge as figures of cartoonish vitality and demented charm. Her mother is the type of Midwestern matriarch who stays up until four in the morning shredding credit card statements, ‘a human Lassie’ with an active imagination for disaster and a love for stories of human tragedy on the internet. Her father is a man of ‘enormous personal appetites’, an arguer, a talker-back, a defier of regulations who ‘has never willingly put on a seat belt in his life’. At home, he exists in a condition of permanent semi-nudity. He watches movies in ‘a state of alarming physical receptiveness’, his thighs spread trustingly towards the screen, cooks bacon by the pound and provides moral instruction to his children with his hand dangling in an immense bowl of homemade pickles (‘the only vegetables he ever ate willingly’). When the urge strikes, he shuts himself up in his study to make ‘violent and incomprehensible sounds’ on the electric guitar.
As a teenager, Lockwood’s father grew his hair long and played in a ten-piece band who wore ‘crushed red velveteen suits, skintight on the leg’. An atheist when he married Lockwood’s mother, a devout Irish Catholic, at 19, he swore he would never willingly enter a church. ‘Like all contrarians,’ though, ‘he felt a secret longing to live with the rules and to love them.’ His conversion experience came during his stint in the navy, watching The Exorcist late at night on a nuclear submarine in the North Atlantic. ‘The room was dark and that eerie, pea-soup light was pouring down, and all around him men in sailor suits were getting the bejesus scared out of them, and the bejesus flew into my father like a dart into a bull’s eye.’ When Lockwood, the second of five children, was born in 1982, he was in the process of becoming a Lutheran minister. But he soon drifted away from Protestantism towards the post-Vatican II Catholic Church: ‘He was tired of grape juice. He wanted wine.’ Along with the rest of her family, Lockwood watched as her father was ordained as a Catholic priest. ‘After it was all over, everyone had to call him Father, but I called him that anyway, so it made no difference to me.’
Father Lockwood was an unorthodox father. He taught his children to swim by throwing them into the water and made the ‘whole family go to the shooting range and compete with each other for accuracy’. When he disliked someone, he cleaned his guns in front of them. (‘Part of me found this habit appalling,’ Lockwood says, ‘but the other part of me respected his flair for high theatre.’) Showing his children The Exorcist to teach them about the nature of evil, he attempted to mute the line ‘your mother sucks cocks in hell’ but unintentionally played it at full volume instead, as Lockwood and her sister clung to each other in terror. The radio perpetually broadcast the ‘orotund, indignant sound’ of Rush Limbaugh and the television the ‘drunken leprechaun sound’ of Bill O’Reilly: ‘It was my father’s pleasure to listen to the two men simultaneously, while emitting the occasional “hoo-hoo” of agreement.’ The house seemed to be ‘made of screaming’. As a teenager, Lockwood wore a pair of ear defenders at all hours of the day; her younger sister developed a habit of sitting motionless in the bath with a cake of soap in her mouth. Lockwood’s husband confesses that he thought she was crazy when they met, but ‘the craziness was in the house. It was like a weather, or an endless guitar solo, or a radio broadcast that never stops playing.’
Lockwood was ‘raised in a closed circle’. Her father was transferred frequently, and she grew up shuttling between parishes in Cincinnati and the suburbs of St Louis, always surrounded by the ‘same dark geometry of buildings’: the ‘closed school, locked gymnasium, the squares and spires of a place of worship plummeting up into the night’. Adolescence was parochial school and Bible study in a shag-carpeted basement, where they spoke in tongues and wore long-sleeved plaid shirts over T-shirts ‘in order not to tempt each other with our bodies’. ‘Everyone who attended was a sibling or a cousin, so that our faces repeated each other with bland variation, like casseroles.’ Lockwood’s younger sister, a pharmacist, was the only member of the family to graduate from college. Lockwood herself briefly considered joining a cloistered order before meeting her husband, the son of Baptist missionaries, on an internet poetry forum. He proposed to her in a grocery store parking lot and the two were married by their early twenties.
Returning home as an adult, Lockwood lapsed easily into her family’s dialect. Priestdaddy reproduces, to great comic effect, their patterns of speech: her father’s interjections of ‘naw!’ and ‘gad’ and ‘bay-bee’; her sister’s ‘nuanced and meaningful growls’; the ‘meaningless vocal improvisation’ that erupts from her mother in the presence of small children. Much of the book’s humour comes from its descriptions of rituals cherished by the group and ridiculous to outsiders, byzantine nicknames and nonsense words, eccentric behaviour invested with meaning through long repetition, anecdotes polished so they have ‘the sheen of crazed pearls’. Lockwood subjects her religion to the same affectionate mockery as her family. There are jokes, some inspired, some less so, about a semen-stained hotel bedspread, about animal-suited fetishists going to confession, about the phallic properties of sacred chalices. There is her father sashaying in an embroidered crimson robe he bought from a ‘dying nonagenarian priest’. There is a scene where she attempts to corrupt the young seminarian staying with her parents by getting him drunk and showing him her stomach. ‘It’s like St Augustine always said,’ she tells him: ‘Oh God, don’t make me good, not ever.’
This kind of twinkling naughtiness can occasionally be hard work. (‘Betty Boop in a pas de deux with David Sedaris,’ Dwight Garner called Priestdaddy in the New York Times.) But it’s a mistake to take Lockwood’s cuteness at face value. The rites and symbols she holds up for ridicule – the solemn processions, the incense, the swords, feathers, tufts and robes – are not only ornamental; they are what transform her father from a man who eats pork rinds in his underwear and washes his legs with Palmolive washing-up liquid into an object of collective veneration. For all its dirty jokes and baby talk, Priestdaddy is an angry book, and Lockwood’s use of childhood idiom is a way of exposing the irrationality of institutional authority. ‘What else could I do but tease them?’ she asks of the priests she knew growing up. ‘I had no real power; it was men like these who were in charge of my life.’
Lockwood’s work often turns on the moment when the familiar becomes unsettling. In her poems, reassuring objects – pettable animals, comics, pencils, blackboards, chalk – are endowed with unnerving qualities: Bambi becomes a stag (‘Now look at the fawn and grow an antler’); dismembered cheerleader parts rain down on a hornet-suited high school mascot; nipples are compared to ‘perfect pink erasers’; an adolescent boy stares at Magic Eye pictures waiting for them to yield up ‘their innocent parts’. In Priestdaddy this moment arrives about a third of the way through the book. Lockwood is telling a funny story about a priest she knew, her sex-ed teacher in high school (‘He used to waggle his head back and forth and say, “No beejays, girls! No hand jobs!”’), when the tone shifts abruptly: ‘You see it coming a mile off, but I didn’t, none of us did: the priest was arrested for having sex with a 14-year-old boy, and he went to jail soon after I was let out of high school for good.’ A few lines earlier, Lockwood had been describing the ‘enclosing quality’ of the shadows outside the cathedral in St Louis, ‘like the part of the blanket that’s tucked right underneath your chin’. Now she pictures a room decorated with a brass cross and potted palms, where ‘the ceiling was so low and the walls were so close that you felt more inside than you ever felt elsewhere. And a priest was in it, and a boy.’
‘When the first wave of scandals broke, in 2002, I felt briefly confused. Didn’t everyone know?’ Lockwood asks. Her childhood was full of stories like this; not exactly secret, but not talked about either, part of the unspoken knowledge that binds together members of any group. A respected member of the congregation, arrested for sexually abusing his daughter, was welcomed back on his release as if nothing had happened. A priest, a friend of Lockwood’s father, used to sit with her six-year-old brother on his lap, cooing his name and flicking ‘his eyes at my mother as if daring her to stop him’. (‘Already I had learned to recognise the ones who hated women, from the way they treated my mother.’) After Lockwood’s rape, her parents send her to a ‘pro-life gynaecologist’ who says t0 her, ‘“Well, now you’ve learned you can’t trust everyone, can you?” in a voice wiped entirely of human sympathy.’ It was then, Lockwood writes, ‘I began to suspect that something is not right with the way these people have arranged the world, no matter what their intentions.’
Early last year, Lockwood wrote a Hunter S. Thompson-like dispatch from the New Hampshire primaries for the New Republic, one of the pieces of election journalism that came closest to capturing the lunatic energy powering Trump’s campaign. (She then tweeted ‘fuck me, daddy’ at Trump using the magazine’s account.) The final third of Priestdaddy moves into similar territory, broadening its scope from the immediate circle of her family and the intermediate one of her church. Lockwood’s poems often play with the idea of the Midwest as the American heartland, but in her memoir she writes of the ‘polluted, hell-bender-coloured Ohio River’; the wasteland of petroleum drums; the toxic sunsets the colour of a ‘blood transfusion’; the local landfill used as a dumping ground for radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project; the creeks full of two-headed snakes and ‘crystalline crawfish snapping clear pincers’; the elevated rates of rare cancers and cysts and stillbirths; the babies born ‘missing eyes, missing ears, conjoined. No one knew why.’ By the book’s final chapters, the screaming has returned, but it’s no longer confined to Lockwood’s house. Instead it’s there in the sky that ‘roared in its loud blue suit like a preacher’; in the protest signs outside abortion clinics reading ‘do you hear the silent scream?’ in letters dripping blood. It is from this vantage point that Lockwood is able to sympathise with her parents, to see them not as gods or monsters but as frightened and desperate people who’re subject to forces beyond their control.
Two days after ‘Rape Joke’ went viral, while Lockwood was living with her parents, she received an email from the editor of the Penguin Poets Series, to whom she had submitted a manuscript six months earlier. He apologised for not responding sooner and told her he wanted to publish her book. Lockwood’s husband was thrilled; her father chuckled with delight, ‘the way he does when the rogue cop gets the better of the by-the-book police chief’. But Lockwood was uneasy. Elsewhere in the memoir, she describes feeling ‘transparent to God and everyone’ as a child. During her first confession, she ‘streamed tears’ over an innocent lie, as though the priest could see through her. After ‘Rape Joke’ was published, she felt something similar, ‘something even beyond bare, as if some interior room had been turned inside out and I found it was large enough to contain the whole world.’ ‘This was the price?’ she couldn’t help thinking. ‘This was the purchase of entry, into that closed and impregnable world?’
The confessional memoir is predicated on the idea that by relating your greatest sin you can free yourself of it. Even in the case of stories with no redemptive arc or obvious lesson to impart, the act of telling itself is supposed to be enough: confess, and you are absolved, forgiven, made new. But the self-exposure in Priestdaddy is a slippery kind. Lockwood’s attempted suicide at 16 is related in a few glancing paragraphs in the middle of a story about the voice lessons she took as a teenager. After she swallowed a bottle of Tylenol, her parents took her to hospital, where she had her stomach pumped and threw up ‘in a single swoop of black eloquence’. Later, her father came to sit by her bed and talk to her, ‘his voice quieter and more targeted at me than I had ever heard it. He said, “The last time I tried to do it …” and the rest floated away.’ It’s a moving scene, but like everything Lockwood writes it has its ironies: her most desperate bid to sever her relationship with her father ends up becoming the moment of closest identification. Your family, your country, the religion of your childhood: you can never entirely exorcise them, and the more you try, the deeper they take hold.
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