Patricia Lockwood: “Embarrassment Is a Great Source of Inspiration”

As her latest poetry collection launches after a decade of publishing prose, Patricia Lockwood talks about minerals, metalsmithing and the importance of making mistakes

“I’ve never had poetry in hardcover before, it’s gorgeous.” Patricia Lockwood is holding her new collection for almost the first time. 

Agate Head Stone Soup had arrived from the printers the morning we met – it’s a return to poetry for Lockwood, who has published only prose for the past decade. A 2013 tweet asking “can a dog be twins?” made her sort of famous, then, in 2021 she won the Dylan Thomas Prize for her novel No One Is Talking About This, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. This year she’s judging it.

We sit in the lobby of the grand and ultra British (paintings of horses, wingback velveteen chairs) Royal Horseguards Hotel. This is a big deal for me – Lockwood’s 2017 memoir Priestdaddy is my favourite book – the book I give as a present. A breathless gallop through her formative years in the Midwest of America, at the heart of which is her father, Greg, a catholic cleric, who loves guns but hates cats and democrats, it is both too much and totally moreish. Like wasabi or tequila or jelly. 

I had wondered if Lockwood might be one of those waggish writers whose funny bones are only for structuring skeletons of poetry or prose but don’t materialise in the flesh. But it turns out she’s droll in every medium, with an irreverence that leads to poem titles such as Money Toad. She also is able to afford topics including Syvia Plath, milf culture, geology, AI slop and the Berenstain Bears the same levels of interest and scrutiny. 

Even how she physically presents is a kind of contradiction: her cropped hair makes her appear chicly gamine, but then she has what she calls “my tail”, a punky appendage which moves when she talks, which is with an energetic melodic cadence, and at considerable speed: voicenote on x1.5.

Her new collection of more than 60 poems is split, in that Agate Head is one side then you flip the book over and Stone Soup is the other (she got the idea from Eileen Myles’s Snowflake/different streets). “The whole thing feels like the two halves dancing round each other,” Lockwood explains. “There are correspondences: Perfect Pussy in the first half and New Cooter in the second.” Certain characters and objects from one, will also feature in the next – drawing them all together. 

The poems are deeply personal (in Perfect Pussy a teen Lockwood realises her substitute teacher is her former doctor and has given her a pap smear) and starkly confessional, borrowing from internet culture, the frailties of humans. They are about the act of cutting. The act of looking. The act of seeing. All studded with quartz and limestone and onyx. 

They are dark:

“Sorry for existing. Black flies landed
On the backs of my ankles and bit.”

and they are funny. 

“Noel Fielding, the only man on earth
With a 360-degree profile. Even behind
His ear, you could see it.”

A normal day for Lockwood begins in her Savannah home with four shots of espresso and no breakfast. She mentions boiling tripe. I don’t know if she’s serious or not but before I can ask she is explaining how she works for long blocks of time in a Moleskein notebook. She often writes around the paws of her three cats. One of her poems, Rosarita, is about the red notebook she wrote much of Agate Head Stone Soup in. She transfers the notes into what she calls “the file” – a word document where things start to take shape. “That’s where you find out if one character likes cherry milkshakes.”

“It felt like I wasn’t given the manual and that I knew nothing about the world” – Patricia Lockwood  

Lockwood worked on this latest collection for years – and prolifically, writing up to three a day. She had the book’s title and everything felt in place. And yet, as she writes in the introduction, “the meanings wouldn’t mean”. She couldn’t quite conclude. “They wouldn’t snap to a finish and a poem should really snap like a green bean or the British tampon … it’s a physical feeling.”

Seedlings of the poems began in a metalsmithing class. In fact, a chapter of her most recent novel, Will There Ever Be Another You is made up of phrases she overheard there. “Stuff like ‘control the flame’ that would mean something else in a lyrical or poetic sense but were being used very concretely in this technical way.” It was in class that she found a 1932 book called Dynamarhythmic Design: A Book of Structural Pattern. “It contained a study of what can happen in a rectangle. Just in a white space. Here’s what ink can do, here’s what cultures have done.” The rectangle, thought Lockwood, is the page.

And then, later, she overheard students talking in a café and had a kind of epiphany when listening to their quotidian conversation. “Let people into the poems! I had never really let people walk in and out of my poems before.” The spontaneity of her writing comes from that openness in Lockwood to consider literally anything as valuable. “When you’re in the very fertile state of writing, anything can be used. And if you do that you get this panorama, this representation of daily life that includes things that people don’t think are fit subjects for poetry. And that’s what you get with New York School poets, people like Elizabeth Bishop.”

As part of the silversmithing practise, Lockwood and her husband Jason purchased a lapidary saw. “Jason became totally addicted to cutting agates, because anything can be inside! Whole worlds. Everyone’s seen the Cookie Monster agate … ” She eyes me with suspicion. “Have you not?” 

Cue Googling the Cookie Monster agate. I am agog. 

Lockwood gets out a soft grey pouch from her bag for life. Inside are a generous handful of stones, which she likes to think with. “Tell me what you see in this rock,” she demands. “It’s a Polychrome Jasper, they have pictures in them.” 

“A traditional Japanese house?”

“Oh!” she cries, delighted. “What I saw was a little mouse on a quest but upside down there’s a hyena dangling the mouse from its mouth!”

The subjectivity of seeing, this discovering of worlds, of knowing there are stories and meanings trapped inside everything – from small minerals to viral memes – is the backbone of Agate Head Stone Soup. She has loved rocks – and other treasures such as marbles and buttons – since she was a small child. She was a quiet kid – “I sat like a lump and observed” – who taught herself to read. Despite this, Lockwood says she took a long time to figure stuff out as she was growing up. 

“Moments of misunderstanding are hugely important for writing poetry ... You want complication, not knowingness. You want to read words wrong and mishear phrases. Also, embarrassment is a great source of inspiration” – Patricia Lockwood

“It felt like I wasn’t given the manual and that I knew nothing about the world.” 

This could be because she moved schools a lot so rules were always changing. Plus, she never went to university. “Those moments of misunderstanding are hugely important for writing poetry,” she says. “You want complication, not knowingness. You want to read words wrong and mishear phrases. Also, embarrassment is a great source of inspiration.”

We talk about poetry being intimidating as a genre: it’s widely considered lofty, serious, and often earnest. It can leave people – including me – feeling that they’ve missed something. 

“No!” Lockwood cries. “There are no secret meanings or hidden symbols. Once people realise that, they can relax. You can enter it as you are, and leave a little bit different. As a reader you are constructing meaning and you can’t do it wrong. I mean if FR Leavis was here maybe you can do it wrong, but he’s dead now … ” 

Her brain seems a tombola of curios, thoughts and ideas pulled from all corners of everywhere. Do they just come to her, unbidden? “Yes. But I have to just let them … Meet Miette, The Kitten With Backwards Legs was from a post I found on the internet,” she says of a poem about her husband’s life threatening abdominal surgery. “I have to go with things that appear to levitate or lighten.” 

She is not terrified of AI but “hates those men and the machine they built … and now they are all just high on their own fumes.” But why isn’t she scared? Aren’t we all going to be jobless, emotionless, illiterate, incompetent and witless in a decade?  “I think people want to see human work,” she says. “We know kids are on our team: they want the weird handmade world.” We talk about the temptations of AI but agree that doing arduous work is an essential part of learning and creativity. “We all need to figure things out, right? And I speak as someone who can’t open a door the right way: I push when it says pull.”

Reading some 140 books for The Booker was “physically strenuous” but not enough to dampen her enthusiasm about the experience. When she was shortlisted she offered her fellow shortlistees a stone from her collection but only Damon Galgut took one – a Larimar Slab – and he won. “So then I got to feel megalomaniacally responsible,” she laughs. Jason, who has arrived to keep the show on the road, reminds her that she also gave Gwendoline Riley a stone in Toronto and she won the Windham-Campbell Prize. “So if I give you a lucky stone you’ll win a prize within a year. Do you want a prize?” She asks – a challenge and a coax. 

Obviously I want a prize! 

She roots around in her leather pouch. I ask for her least special stone because I don’t have any competition to enter except for the pom pom dahlia category in my village’s annual fete and I feel powerful stones need to be for stuff like the Booker and not provincial jamborees. But she gives me the most beautiful stone, a lustrous milky white blob. “It’s a Gobi Agate and it forms a pearl around a nucleus,” she says. “I don’t know what they’d look like inside but it glows … ” 

And with that, she leaves, her tail bobbing behind her, and me with a whole world in my hand.

Agate Head Stone Soup is published by Bloomsbury Publishing and out now