Fran Lock in human and hyena form
Fran Lock likes to describe her poetic practice as feral - by which she means "omnivorous, opportunistic, accretive and excessive" [1].
Hers is not a poetry which germinates in "periods of quiet sustained reflection", but one cobbled together with a certain violence and a needs-be-as-needs-must attitude born of her working-class background.
But is it any good? Based on the work I've read so far, I'd say it is ...
Or, at any rate, I'd say that - as a Deleuzian - it appeals to me, because, like Kafka, Lock is not attempting to express the inexpressible, or impose a coherent and conventional linguistic form on lived experience, so much as construct a minor literature.
In other words, she problematises everyday language which all-too-easily and all-too-often becomes sticky with familiar use and overlaid with doxa.
Raised with a strong sense of her Irish heritage, Lock carries English away from itself and opens up a kind of foreign tongue within it; not by simply
inventing neologisms, but by forcing a dominant language
out of its usual syntactic conventions and thereby making it stutter or
scream and travel to its own external limits (limits which are not
outside language, but are the outside of language).
It's no surprise that Lock is also interested in therianthropy, because writing at its best always effects a becoming-animal (be it insect, hyena, or great white whale) [2] and transports us from the land of Oedipus to that zone of indiscernibility wherein we can lose our domesticated human selves and experiment with wild forms of otherness.
She doesn't always succeed, but that's okay; Lock has learnt to assume the risks of failure and embrace her "moments of humiliated over-reach", continually pushing not only beyond her own comfort zone but her own competence.
It's better, she argues, to be thought ridiculous than boring and if that alienates some readers and critics, she doesn't care; "I’m not a branch of the service industry, and nobody said my
relationship to the people encountering my work had to be gentle or
friendly."
That's a statement that makes an old punk very happy ...
Notes
[1] Fran Lock, 'T. S. Eliot Prize Writers' Notes', on the Poetry School website: click here. All lines quoted here are from this text.
[2] Admittedly, and somewhat disappointingly, Lock refers her idea of becoming animal (understood in terms of literal transformation) back to the American author Charles Hoy Fort and his book Wild Talents (1932), and not to Deleuze and Guattari's more philosophical notion developed in Mille Plateaux (1980).
Bonus: to watch Fran Lock briefly talking about her work, her relation to language, and animal transformation fantasy, click here.
I am grateful to Chloe Rose Campbell for introducing me to the work of Fran Lock.
