What Would Twitter Do?

Welcome to the seventh week of What Would Twitter Do? In this series, I interview some of my favourite people on Twitter about their Twitter habits and philosophies. This week features Patricia Lockwood. Her poetry has appeared in many places, including The New Yorker, and Poetry, and she was recently profiled at length (and rather beautifully) in The New York Times Magazine. Her books include Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, which appeared this spring. Her memoir is forthcoming.

I experience her feed as a bright yellow light—brilliant and energetic and totally engaged with the comedic and the absurd. Her tweets are always surprising, and have a weird, trilling joy vibrating somewhere deep within them, no matter the tweet’s mood or subject. They are often sexual and edged with feminism—

*gets down on my knees to suck a dick of knowledge*

and

To the villain who tried to trick me into watching the world cup by telling me it was happening between my legs: thanks, i loved the game

—and they sometimes tell of the act of writing or the act of tweeting itself, as in—

Most of my tweets should be read in the voice of a 90s youth minister who is getting some pop-culture detail very slightly wrong

One of my recent favourite is this one:

In the 1990s every single song was about a girl who gave herself an abortion by walking unsteadily on a roof.

I was excited to have the chance to interview her by email.

—Sheila Heti

SHEILA HETI: Can you tell me about the pleasure you get from pictures of bunnies eating your book? You have retweeted at least four of these so far.

PATRICIA LOCKWOOD: The story about once going to a petting zoo and seeing a bunny who was almost certainly the reincarnation of Walt Whitman is true. I was walking around the bunny enclosure, not expecting anything supernatural at all, when I saw him meditating outside of his hutch. His beard FLOWED over his breasts. So when the first woman tweeted the picture of her bunbun nibbling my cover, which is indeed leafy, the memory came back to me and I knew I had better put out a call for more.

Here’s what I think: the best author photo ever taken is the author photo of you holding your extra-large engulfing rabbit and looking straight at the camera. I never hope to have one so good. The only way I guess it could be any more literary is if the rabbit were smoking a Gauloise and drinking...