Then a heartbreaking event thrusts our hero back into her person, unleashing the novel’s full lyrical force in the process.
Still, the poem ends with the reunification of word and flesh: “you stood in me like a spine,” the speaker tells Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “put poppies behind my eyes, / just the fact of you.” Only in No One Is Talking About This, which became Lockwood’s first novel when it was published in February, does the body seem inimical to language, a stumbling block on the protagonist’s way to total immersion in the internet, or “portal.” At least this is how things look for a while. In her most recent poem, published in 2017, an Ode gets to wear motorcycle boots, eat a cigarette and whoop, but the speaker herself transforms into a “ridiculous pantsuit” worn by the world as it falls away. In Lockwood’s two books of poetry, her memoir and her growing corpus of literary criticism, bodies-sexy, absurd, washed in dish soap or similes-are front and center. Instead, Lockwood foregrounds the reader’s relationship to the poet’s language, a relationship that the poet forges through the power of her charisma, which is both sexual and magical. Lockwood, however, isn’t interested in crafting a character whose job is to be relatable despite her difference. When you / hear, ‘He is breathing,’ you’ll stand up again.” The notion that reading promotes empathy or pleasurable feeling is neither radical nor new it is well-rehearsed in defenses of literature. In the final poem of that volume, “The Hypno-Domme Speaks, and Speaks and Speaks,” Lockwood presents a model of reading that involves not just submission but also conditioning, a way of developing a bodily response to language: “When a gunshot / rings out you’ll lie down like you’re dead. That Lockwood views reading as an intensely physical, almost sexual surrender won’t come as a surprise to those who have encountered her work, especially her second poetry collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. For Lockwood, poetry happens in the place where the intellect touches sensation, where the thinking brain meets the feeling body: the poetry of the brain stem, ars medulla oblongata. Or the hackles rise.” The “wild gasp” is another such embodied response, primal. … put themselves in your trust, they put their bodies in your hands, you tap the right place and the leg kicks. In 2015, Patricia Lockwood released an “artist’s statement” of sorts on Twitter: “Thinking of the wild gasp I released when a friend told me that Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings were of ‘Giant Vaginas’ and how that is the ONLY reaction I ever want from a reader.” After all, as she told the Awl, “The part of us that reads poetry is a reflex part.
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