Whether she’s writing a poem about Shirley Temple (“Shirley Temple what makes you cry. The word ‘sunshine’ had a washed look, with the sweep of a rag in the middle of it,” she writes in Priestdaddy, something she puts down to being, she says, “not a neurotypical person”.
She has always had an almost synaesthetic reaction to words: “When I read the words ‘moonlit swim’ I saw the moonlight slicked all over the bare skin. When Lockwood was a young unknown, her poems occasionally getting plucked from the slush piles of literary magazines, posting online taught her how to let her personality shine through in her writing.
So she largely dictates her notes: “But I have to consider myself lucky, even though I can’t use my hands.” She still can’t type due to the arthritis she developed: “See how the joints are crazy prominent?” she says, holding up her palms, joints pressing through the flesh. Whereas she used to travel often, she has been largely housebound for the past year, partly due to the lockdown, but mainly becasue of her health. She had a bad bout of it: “Everyone I know who had Covid says that at some point in the night they felt like, ‘OK, body, you had a good run, we’re over now.’ But so many people died who didn’t have to,” she says. She is also a contributing editor for the London Review of Books where she wrote about her recent experience with long-term Covid, which she caught when travelling to Harvard last year to give a lecture. As well as two poetry collections ( Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals), she has published a bestselling memoir, 2017’s Priestdaddy, about when she and her husband were forced to move back in with her mother and her raucously eccentric father, who became a Catholic priest after watching The Exorcist 72 times. “It was like every hour became somehow cubic and we were chained up in it like a murder basement,” she writes back, combining the punchy hyperbole of Twitter (“murder basement”) with the lyrical originality (“every hour became somehow cubic”) that has made her a literary star. Everyone I know who had Covid says that at some point in the night they felt like, 'OK, body, you had a good run, we’re over now' ‘Wow,’ I yell in ecstasy, ‘This makes no sense at all.’” And asking the Paris Review: “So is Paris any good or not” (no punctuation, of course.) So I feel no shame in admitting my social media addiction to her. Lockwood is often described as “the poet laureate of Twitter” and the 38-year-old originally made a name for herself with her joyfully weird tweets, such as her parodies of sexts (“ I am a Dan Brown novel and you do me in my plot-hole. I tell her that I’ve spent 127 hours on Twitter.
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