“Aaliyah would have been on Twitter. It is fucked up that she is dead.”: An Interview with Patricia Lockwood, Poet Laureate of Twitter

Patricia Lockwood is a poet. (A poet. A very good poet.) She also uses Twitter in interesting ways. Earlier this year, her series of SEXTS got attention from Rhizome, and then The Huffington Post & The New Yorker.

And I look at those tweets and I wonder, “How does someone do that?” Not get attention, though. I mean write those. How? So I asked.

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So, I was initially pretty dismissive of Twitter. And then, at some point, I noticed how funny it could be and found it to be a mostly worthwhile distraction. And then—probably while reading the fake Christopher Walken feed—I began to think there could be something kind of poetic about Twitter. That each little update could be a joke, a persona poem, a zen koan.

Did you sense the “poetic” potential in the Twitter post from the beginning or did your approach to Twitter change?

It took me about ten years to join Twitter because, like old men everywhere, I “did not get it.” What is the … where are your mentions … what is hashtag … who is a belieber? When I did join, I spent my first week livetweeting the movie Bambi, focusing specifically on the puberty of Bambi and Thumper, and was subsequently unfollowed with extreme prejudice by the few poets who had charitably followed me in the first place. (This still happens! A real writer will follow me and then four days later be like “what the freak is this” and it is goodbye. CAN’T believe you wrote a tweet about Jesus jelqing.)

OK, so scrolling back, I see that one of my earliest tweets was “I want to see the Beethoven movie where Beethoven finally manages to tear his way out of the dog’s body and play something good on the piano.” About two weeks later I sexted for the first time, like a teen. So it wasn’t so much that I saw the possibilities right away as that … Twitter is the perfect way to disseminate the kind of writing that comes most naturally to me.
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Author Spotlight / 29 Comments
March 7th, 2012 / 7:18 pm

#THINGSIDIDNTTWEETATAWP

These are things I didn’t tweet while walking around AWP like a zombie (typos included):

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Random / 22 Comments
March 7th, 2012 / 4:11 pm

The Higgs-Jameson Experimental Fiction Debate, part 2

CH: Now then, while your definition (in Part 1) is certainly more elegant than mine in its brevity, it seems problematic to me in terms of its three main assumptions: unfamiliarity, the dominant, and schism.

Jakobson’s idea of the dominant, for example, seems patently antithetical to experimental literature because it supposes an integrity of structure that I’d classify as akin more to orthodoxy than heterodoxy.  In other words, “a focusing component” tends not to be an attribute of experimental literature; in fact, it seems to me that the comportment of experimental literature stems from a distaste or distrust or disinclination toward such a notion.

ADJ: That’s a fair point, although I think even experimental fiction has its organizing principles. There are always some things the artist wants to do, and other things he or she doesn’t want to do—even if that changes from section to section, or moment to moment. The dominant is simply a record of those desires—and note that my definition does not require them to be conventional.

Would you say, then, that experimental fiction lacks any and all convention? Any and all integrity in its structure? And, if so, can you give examples of such texts (fiction that lacks any and all convention, any and all structural integrity)?

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Craft Notes / 16 Comments
March 7th, 2012 / 3:46 pm

NEA slams BlazeVOX authors

This letter just came from the NEA to a BlazeVOX author:

Dear XXX:

It has come to our attention that BlazeVOX books has asked authors to contribute to the cost of publishing their own books.

The eligibility requirements for the NEA’s Creative Writing Fellowships prohibit applicants from using publications from presses that require individual writers to pay for part or all of the publication costs (http://www.arts.gov/grants/apply/Lit/eligibility.html).

Therefore, you may not use a book published BlazeVOX book to establish your eligibility.  You have until 4:00 p.m. (Eastern) on Friday, March 9, 2012 to establish your eligibility for the fellowships using alternate publications.  Please email your new Summary of Applicant Publications to me at bergerb@arts.gov by the deadline.  Any applicant failing to meet this deadline will be deemed ineligible for the fellowships.

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Behind the Scenes / 51 Comments
March 7th, 2012 / 1:31 pm
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I receive an email from the “Senior Interviews Editor” of “Snatch Haus Review” (a blog that gets 4 hits per day) (which is more than my blog) (but still).

He asks if I’d like to “give an interview.”

I know full well that the “interview” I’ll be “giving” really consists of me fbooking the link to the “interview” and ppl quickly “liking” it and not “reading” it. The most eyes this “interview” will ever get will be on the link I post to fbook and when I say the link I mean the link itself and not the page the link leads to.

“Absofuckinlutely,” I say. “Thank you for asking.”

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observation recent

One writer is very earnest, a Poet, sprinkling tendrils, donning hats, trying to enunciate the fuck out of words, trying to pull a stick of butter out a badger’s ass, something, and in one way you think, young, trying, at least still believes while another hand says (hands talk now—this is poetry) relax Thing, calm your gossamer spirit down, flutterby, it’s only poetry and I need to ABS glue the couplings on the toilet drain on Monday—it’s going to smell like shit. One writer has recent stories in Paris Review and New Yorker and steps up to the mic and quickly contextualizes an excerpt and reads calmly, clearly, slowly for 7 minutes and thanks the organizers of the reading, the audience, sits down and shares a beer with me. One writer screams penis!/penis!/penis! into the microphone but only for a short while so it’s fine. (The word penis makes everyone think; I mean it has built careers [Freud or Hilton or your own, etc].)

One writer opens with, “This is the shortest story in my collection” and I feel a shiver through the room as three people turn to the bar to reload their urns with beer. It’s still not quite right to text, turn away, talk to someone, rumple yourself loud, walk through, at least not too often—the writer is looking right at you. The writer is a human being. One writer sort of sways and/or faints. I feel for them. One writer reads and you want to grab them right then and sleep with them—who can say words don’t work? One writer reads and you want to put a bracelet on their ankle, to monitor them, so you can stay reliably away. One writer wears a black shoe and a brown shoe, and it’s a fun bar conversation, this presentation of shoes. One writer is terrified; one writer might as well be in their own bathtub, luxuriating in the warm bubbles of audience eyes. “I don’t know what to do up there,” she said, when I asked her opinion. “Just don’t be that guy.” Well said, I suppose. But which guy was she asking us not to be?

Craft Notes / 10 Comments
March 7th, 2012 / 9:41 am

Harmony Korine Q/A

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Film / 18 Comments
March 6th, 2012 / 6:52 pm

3 New from Action Books: Burning City, Cronk, Hyesoon

If you don’t own every title Action Books puts out, I’d say you’re slipping. Here are three new just released units for that library of teeth:

Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity ed. by Jed Rasula & Tim Conley [like 400 pp full of insane shit discoveries]

Skin Horse by Olivia Cronk [I’ve already read this twice, it’s wow]

All the Garbage of the World, Unite! by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi [Which after Hyesoon’s first book, Mommy Must Be A Mountain of Feathers, also from Action, I’m ready to be killed again]

Eat!!!!!!!!!!!!

Presses / 5 Comments
March 6th, 2012 / 3:20 pm

Do As Franzen Does. Do What You Like

In some ways, we’ve brought this on ourselves; it is a slippery slope. First you wonder what Angelina Jolie had for breakfast because she was so great in that one movie or whatever and then you’re buying cereal and thinking, “Does Oprah eat Raisin Bran?” Eventually, you even start to give a damn about what famous writers think about the weather or, say, social networking, and someone like Jonathan Franzen revels in his dislike of Twitter and other means of social networking from his Important Writer perch and we respond because if Franzen hates Twitter does he hate us too? The angst is unbearable and yet it’s all sort of inevitable.

Franzen’s A Great American Writer and all but I don’t give a much of a damn about his opinions on anything (see: Edith Wharton obvi). Or I do. Is it really surprising that Franzen doesn’t care for Facebook or Twitter? His overall comportment does not suggest an affinity for the levity of social networking. I can’t really say I love Facebook, myself. It has become increasingly hard to make sense of the interface and I keep getting invited to parties and readings in Bali and Temecula and I don’t live in those places so the experience is, at best, fragmented. At the same time, I don’t need to proselytize my dislike unless I’m on Twitter. Who cares? My opinion doesn’t matter nor does Franzen’s, though he is Very Fancy so in the calculus of mattering, his irrelevant opinion is less irrelevant than mine. Math.

J. Franz talking smack about Twitter, though, thems fighting words.

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Random & Web Hype / 67 Comments
March 6th, 2012 / 3:13 pm
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Please forgive the shameless self-promotion, but did you guys know Puerto del Sol has a blog now? We’ve moved into the 21st century, yo. We’re talking writing, MFA, journal editing, AWP, fonts, avatars, internet, whatever. Come, visit, say hello.

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