Patricia Lockwood Featured in The New York Times Magazine

Wonderful. You can't stop us if you've heard this one, but The New York Times Magazine profiled Patricia Lockwood yesterday! Though Lockwood is placed in our eyes as a "woodland creature" (eh?) and "indie-poet royalty" (sigh), it's a great read. "Nothing I say is actually physically possible on any plane of existence." Jesse Lichtenstein writes more on the poet:

Lockwood, who goes by “Tricia,” may be best known for her persona on Twitter, where her steady stream of surreal, sexually explicit and often sexually impossible humor has won her 30,000 followers and a string of admirers in the world of comedy. Andy Richter, the longtime sidekick to Conan O’Brien, considers her a friend, though he has never met her offline: “She’s funny, she’s interesting and she’s a weirdo — which is all I ask for in a person.” Megan Amram, a writer for “Parks and Recreation,” came across Lockwood’s poetry first, relishing her ability to “heighten pop culture to saintly levels,” and then found her Twitter feed. “Both of us love the subversion of common sayings or verbal tropes,” Amram told me, “and we also love making fun of the way women are viewed as sex objects.” Rob Delaney, whom Comedy Central called “the funniest person on Twitter” and who has more than a million Twitter followers, heard about Lockwood from Amram. He “went insane,” he said, “and read everything by her.”

Lockwood’s Twitter “sexts” — inspired by political scandals and cable-news stories on the sexual menace of cellphones — reimagine the sweaty-thumbed expression of a generation’s libido as a kind of gnomic poetry. She began composing the sexts in 2011, and soon online journals were compiling their favorites. The Huffington Post ran an article with the headline: “Patricia Lockwood’s Sext Poems Will Make You LOL.” Many are unprintable in these pages, but here’s a taste:

Sext: I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You
put your whole head through me

Sext: I give u the Heimlich maneuver when u don’t even need the
Heimlich maneuver. A grape pops out of u that u never even ate

Sext: I am a water glass at the Inquisition. You are a dry pope mouth. You
pucker; I wet you

More from our own Don Share (!), Lawrence as literary, literary husbands, and Lockwood at The New York Times Magazine.