Fran Lock is the T.S. Elliot Prize nominated author of acclaimed pamphlets of poems and poetry collections; and an Associate Editor at Culture Matters. To see her live is to witness a full gale force of charisma. There's little I'd recommend more. This is what it says about Fran at the Poetry Foundation website: Fran Lock is the author of several poetry collections, including Contains Mild Peril (2019), Raptures and Captures (2019), Ruses and Fuses (2018), Muses and Bruises (2017), Dogtooth (2017), The Mystic and the Pig Thief (2014), and Flatrock (2011). Fran agreed to be interviewed by me, Wayne Dean-Richards, for the always fabulous Outsideleft…
Wayne Dean-Richards: Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed for Outsideleft and for agreeing to operate a time machine.
Fran Lock: Happy to be here. Maybe – just maybe – like the cyborg assassins we are, we can prevent the birth of Jeffrey Archer and alter the otherwise doomed course of literary history.
WD-R: Your entry on the Poetry Foundation website, I have to say, is impressive stuff - but when you first started putting your work out there what did you say in your bio?
Fran Lock: I'm not sure that “impressive” is quite the word I'd use, but it certainly indicates what an obnoxious try-hard I am. Which is great, because that's exactly the look I was going for. Funnily enough, that bio is also bit of a throw-back, to a time I was still submitting to Poetry Magazine, right before they decided to publish Kirk Nesset. I can't send work there now. It's ruined for me. This is not, by any stretch, a meaningful boycott. I just prefer the journals I submit to not make me a little bit sick in my mouth.
Apart from an ever-expanding list of books nobody wants to read my bio hasn't changed much since I first started submitting work. I still always begin and end the same way, it's just that not all publications are game to include the details “Fran Lock is a sometime itinerant dog-whisperer […] She hates the Tories and all their works.” To me, though, that gives a prospective reader a much better sense of what I'm about than a litany of largely unloved titles.
Oh, and ashamed to relate, when I first got my Ph.D. I used to include that in all my bios. To be honest, I'd crowbar my doctorate into even the most casual and unrelated of conversations. It felt so impressive and important at the time, but I've since had to learn that nobody gives a shit.
WD-R: Whilst we’re at this way back when point, where was your first poem published and do you remember how it felt?
FL: The first “proper” poem I had published – as opposed to the kind of deranged pseudonymous drivel I contributed to various zines – was called 'The Inscribing Hour', and it was accepted for The Stinging Fly in 2011. It was not only the first poem I'd had published, but the first time I'd been paid for a poem, to the princely sum of €25. I was almost deliriously delighted by that. I won't say “proud” because I wasn't convinced it wasn't a) a trick, b) a trap, or c) a mistake, but I was so thrilled that I carried both my contributor copy and cheque around with me in my bag for months. I even took them back to Dublin with me (The Stinging Fly is based in Dublin), clutching them like weird talismans until they both started to get a bit tatty, and economic necessity forced me to cash the cheque.
To be honest, I don't know if publication would have meant so much to me if it hadn't been The Stinging Fly that accepted the poem, but it was a journal I read and greatly admired (still do). Also, living in London and being very cut off from Ireland in a lot of ways, it was meaningful to me to make that connection with an Irish publication, and to feel that – however partially and imperfectly – my first poetic community had its roots in Ireland. I wanted my first time – ahem – to be special. And it was... Aw, bless.
WD-R: OK, now if you’ll push that green button there, please: bottom left-hand corner of the dashboard of the time machine – how weird: I don’t know about you, but I hadn’t realised how much time machines resemble Morris Minors – we’ll go even further back…
FL: That is weird. Almost exactly like my Granddad's (I kid you not) turquoise Morris Minor. Complete with the gaping hole in the footwell and smell of wet dog. Could it be he was probing the secrets of the fourth dimension this entire time? Who knew?
...my early affinity for poetry didn't come from words on a printed page, but from listening to the rhythms and whip-quick language tactics of my family.
WD-R: …Here we are then: a time before you were writing poems yourself much less putting them out there. As a reader what were the first poems you came across that you felt connected to? And how did that connection come about – family member, teacher, friend? - who was your poetry enabler, if you will?
FL: First off, kudos for “poetry enabler”, I love that. Second, wow, that's a tough one. I think the answer is probably something like I experienced poetry before I experienced poems. What I mean by that my early affinity for poetry didn't come from words on a printed page, but from listening to the rhythms and whip-quick language tactics of my family. There wasn't a great deal of formal education, but there were folk-songs, jokes, verbal sparring, just a joy of using language in wickedly improvised and surprising ways. To be poor is also to be infernally acquainted with the power of language, with that continuous negotiation for resources and support, to avoid negative attention, etc. As a kid you learn to speak and hear with such precision in order to survive, and that's the kind of sensibility, that pressured attention, that I look for in the poetry I am most interested in reading.
It was a little later on that I first found printed poetry I could relate to and wanted to emulate. Because we moved around so much, and because I was exposed to such a wide variety of influences, my reading was largely unsupervised, madly omnivorous, and really fucking erratic. I'd just pick whatever off the library shelf. I got hold of Shelly that way, but also Ciaran Carson, John Hughes, Edna St Vincent Millay, Plath. Ridiculous stuff really, way beyond my comprehension level, but even though I didn't really “understand” the specifics of a poem, I knew it was using English ways that felt like a kind of counter-magic to the mean-spirited institutional English that dominated our everyday lives. Obviously, I wasn't thinking in those terms at nine – I was insufferable, but nobody's that insufferable – I just knew it felt subversive, and I knew I wanted in.
Ciaran Carson's 'Belfast Confetti' was probably one of the first poems that “clicked” for me. It was something I understood and recognised, but the experience was alchemised by language. It was a poem in English, which was a really big deal for me, that English was capable of this too.
But if we're talking about the single biggest “poetry enabler” in my life, then that title belongs to my mentor, editor and friend, the poet Roddy Lumsden. I owe to Roddy not only my sense of myself as a poet, but also my radically expanded understanding of the field of contemporary poetry; my engagement with what's happening in poetry right now, as a living, social thing. I talk about Roddy a lot as somebody who inspired me, and who helped me hone my craft, but he also gave me a model for doing poetry, for participating and being in the world. That's massive, and I really miss him.
WD-R: Ahead of us doing a Michael J Fox and heading back to the future: How did that connection you felt for poetry become a desire/need to write poetry yourself? And, when you began writing poetry, how did you go about it – your process? And has that process changed over the years?
FL: I have a theory that as a working-class person you don't ever get to develop anything like a “process” or a “routine”. Life just does not allow for such things. The rhythms of our work are too unpredictable. While I'm writing every day – and the need to write is an absolute compulsion – the where, when, and how of that writing is wildly variable, and my sense is that the unpredictable rhythms by which I live also inform the substance of my writing, the way I write, that jittery, opportunistic and excessive feel.
There’s this persuasive cultural myth – certainly in the global north – that poetry is an essentially middle-class pursuit, that it germinates in periods of quiet sustained reflection. Ugh. I don’t agree with that. There’s not this ideal contemplative position that is equally possible for everyone. I think that for many of us, poetry erupts in the midst of precarity and scarcity, in the jaws of unlovable labour. That hasn't changed for me. I describe my practice as “feral”, a kind of scavenging from the edges. And that's why poetry: it's cheap and you can do it by yourself. By which I mean that it's the perfect mode of artistic production for those who are poor in time and in resources. If I'm compelled to write, what that writing looks like is shaped by the (often rubbish) material conditions of my life.
WD-R: Just before you hit the red button on the bottom right-hand corner of the dashboard and take us back to the present day, since we’re sitting here in a time machine is there any historical period you’d like to call in on? Warning: If you say there is I’m going to ask: What is it and why would you like to stop off there?
FL: So there are two answers to this really: a “fun” one, and a genuine one.
“Fun” – and I use that word advisedly – is Kent, the summer of 1450, because I want to be present at the Jack Cade Rebellion, which was arguably one of the most important popular uprisings to take place in England during the long Middle Ages. I mean, it was well organised, it was initially super successful, it brought London to a standstill and caused Henry VI to do a bunk to Warwickshire, yet so much of the historical record has been lost or wilfully misinterpreted that little of any real substance is known about the historical Jack Cade. I'm a bit of an amateur medievalist, and since moving to Kent I have become obsessed with Jack Cade as part of our lost dissenting history, so a first-hand gander at his would-be revolution would be way too tempting to pass up.
But in all seriousness, I'd want to go back to the late nineties/early aughts and spend one last night out with my dear friend Marty, who I lost to suicide coming up on ten years ago now. This is something I've thought about a good deal. I think when you lose someone like that, you have those kinds of “if-only-I-could-go-back” conversations with yourself. You imagine what you could say or do differently to change the end result. I have a feeling, though, that none of that would be possible, even in a universe where time travel existed. So instead I'd like to go back and make the most of him in life, appreciate and enjoy him, build one last good memory, be patient with him, let him know that he was loved.
Sorry, that's kind of a downer. I can see him shaking his head like “For fuck's sake, Biddy.”
WD-R: So, now we’re back in 2024 let’s play Desert Island Books: What’d be the five books you’d choose to have with you if you were stranded on a desert island and why this five? (BTW - If you assert that living in the 21st century is strangely like living on a desert island anyway, I’m not going to contradict you. :)
FL: That's so hard! I suppose, if I'm going to be here for a while I'd do as well to bring all of the thick, worthy tomes I never quite got through in the outside world. Or not. I mean, just the thought of lugging the emotionally arid Millwall brick that is David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest with me to my isolated island redoubt depresses me beyond the power of mere words to convey. Have you read it? I'll freely admit I'm probably not the target audience for that book, but I sincerely tried to get through it and it felt like I was being poshsplained to for upwards of nine-trillion pages. You know, how a particular kind of clever posh boy has to autopsy all of his jokes to you, incorrectly assuming that you didn't laugh because you didn't get it, and not because, in point of fact, it wasn't remotely funny? Like that. Except in print. Basically forever. Sorry DFW fans.
I digress. And I guess I should maybe shy away from fiction so as not to alienate anyone else. I'll confine myself to more-or-less contemporary poetry, then, and to books that remain as fresh to me on my 500th reading as they were on my first. Let's face it, I don't know how long I'm going to be here, so I'm going to want the kind of intellectual stimulation that whittling alone cannot provide. So: the formally superlative Terrific Melancholy by Roddy Lumsden, the ferally shifting terrain of C.S. Giscombe's Prairie Style, the blistering social reckoning that is Sean Bonney's Letters Against the Firmament, the disquieting genius of Kim Hyesoon's I'm OK, I'm Pig!, and the eternally enigmatic Emily Dickinson, in my As She Preserved Them edition of her collected poems. There are tons of others I could have picked, but these are the collections that live on my desk, refreshing my inspiration with their playful and provocative engagement with language. Ask me next month and I might well have changed my mind. About all but Roddy.
WD-R: Flatrock was your first published collection back in 2011, and for many poets the first collection is particularly auspicious so can you walk us through that - from contacting Little Episodes, to publication and reception.
FL: Oh God, I'd rather not. No, I don't mind really, but “auspicious” is so not the word, and while I remain grateful for the opportunity, the experience wasn't anything I thought or hoped it would be. To be fair – and to be brutally honest with myself – that has as much to do with me as a poet as Little Episodes as a publisher. I simply wasn't ready for a full collection at that stage of my writing life. I hadn't worked my apprenticeship, I hadn't honed or alchemised those experiences, I hadn't taken ownership of my voice, I hadn't earned my stripes. I was over-eager, and I didn't know the ropes: what to expect, how any of it worked, where my own writing fit into the broader context of contemporary poetry. So when I was approached by Little Episodes during the second year of my MA, I fair bit their hand off. Which a more mature or schooled person would not have done.
To cut that slimmer, more youthful version of me some slack, I think what attracted me to Little Episodes was the social out-reach aspect of what they did. It felt in those early days like they were really trying to build a community, a safe space for those of us who wrote and made art from places of pain and precarity. It was an opportunity to be heard, but one that still emphasised the craft and creativity in what we did, that tried to establish connections and collaborations, to make something really vibrant and joyful... What I learnt was that kind of mouth music is easy to make but maintaining it any sustained way is a lot harder. It's not very glamorous or fun either, and it definitely doesn't turn a profit. When the community element of Little Episodes folded I think a lot of people were left feeling a bit bereft and unsupported. Myself included.
Which makes it sound as if I'm bitter. I'm really not. Even if something doesn't work out like you hope, the experience is still instructive. And in any case, it gave me a foot in the door. Those poems are not the best thing I ever wrote, but they were the best thing I knew how to make from those experiences at the time, and not all of them are a dead loss. I learnt a lot about who I was and what I wanted to accomplish with and through my writing during that process, but my most valuable lesson, and the thing I would pass on in all caps to anybody who comes after is just that there's a difference between you being ready and the writing being ready. I wish I'd trusted my instincts more on that distinction.
Thing is, if we – the great unwashed – wait to be invited to the party, we'll still be standing in the rain with our noses pressed to the glass at chucking out time. Better to at least try to build your own thing.
WD-R: Can you talk me through how you came to be an Associate Editor at Culture Matters and some of your landmark moments in that role?
FL: Yes! In Culture Matters I think I finally found the kind of art-as-activism ethos I'd been looking for with Little Episodes, and throughout my erratic pre-publication zine life, so it's a joy to speak about.
It was Pete Raynard at Proletarian Poetry who originally put me in touch with our show-runner and Editor in Chief, Mike Quille, with a view to submitting my weirdly specific anarcha-feminist opus Muses & Bruises, a collection written in collaboration with collage artist Steev Burgess that reimagined the nine Greek Muses as Travller women. To my utter amazement, Mike wanted to publish the book, and invited me to become a regular contributor for Culture Matters. It was a great opportunity for me to hone my essay-writing chops, to highlight social and cultural issues I felt strongly about, and to support other working-class writers by reviewing their work and interviewing them for the site. From there, as I gained in confidence and experience, my role expanded quite organically and gradually to the position I'm in now, where I'm a little more hands-on about soliciting and commissioning work. I'm also responsible for our occasional live iterations and the online digital reading series.
I've no idea what I'm doing in that regard, but I'm a big believer in learning by attempting, so I just take a bash at it and see what sticks. Thing is, if we – the great unwashed – wait to be invited to the party, we'll still be standing in the rain with our noses pressed to the glass at chucking out time. Better to at least try to build your own thing. Even if it goes badly. Even if you fail. I sometimes get the feeling that nobody – certainly not within the academic circles to which I find myself adjacent – wants to take us very seriously. But fuck 'em. I won't be made complicit in my own defeat by not trying. Who cares what they think? That's very much my approach with Culture Matters: have a go. I love that about the site and the press, it's full of writers with these niche projects and areas of interest, pursuing their obsession, having their say. There's no real house-style either because we're not defined by any kind of aesthetic disposition, we're united by our desire for a fairer society, by class solidarity, by a vision of better things.
I think the publications I am the most proud of are the two anthologies I helmed. One – Witches, Warriors, Workers – with Jane Burn, and one on my own – The Cry of the Poor. Looking back on it, undertaking something like that by myself seems like absolute madness, but I did it, and in the process created space for over 100 creative responses to poverty as both social reality and subjective experience. I like anthologies in general because they summon the very connections and solidarities they dare to imagine. They feel inclusive in the proper – as opposed to representational box-ticking – sense. I also loved doing our pamphlet series though, with short collections from Al Hutchins, Kevin Patrick McCann, Martin Hayes, and most recently, Peter Raynard. Last year we published a full collection, A Brief and Biased History of Love, by the mighty Alan Humm. I really believe in that collection. It has been a slow-burner so far, but I'm so glad to have worked with him on it.
WD-R: What are you working on currently?
FL: So much. I'm a bit of a freak when it comes my own creative out-put, and having decided to sit on the frankly massive manuscript I finished last year/ beginning of this, I've been devoting myself to smaller projects. The most recently published of these is the pamphlet The New Herbal, recently released from Blueprint Press, and an album (don't laugh) with Avzounds. In the background I've been finalising another pamphlet Hag Stone; a collection inspired by Mary Magdalene and the insurrectionary teachings of Jesus, while putting together an expanded omnibus of my three previous Culture Matters collections for release later this year. Myself and Peadar O'Donoghue have also been collaborating on a series of poems inspired by Mark E. Smith and The Fall.
In terms of editorial work, I'm hoping to revisit our pamphlet series early next spring with short collections from four women. I'm also working on organising some live fund-raisers for Culture Matters... I sometimes feel like the Del Boy of UK poetry publishing. This time next year, etc., etc.
WD-R: What question would you have liked me to ask that I was too fucking dumbass to come up with? (If you have one, please answer it, too.)
FL: Well, I always hope people will ask me about my dog, because banging on about my dog is my chief source of pleasure and recreation. Her name is Luna Moona Petrescu and she's a broadly adorable staffy/American bully cross. You're very welcome!
In all seriousness, I like to be asked about what advice I would give to up-and-coming poets, because while I really only have one generically useful insight to offer, I believe it's a goodie. To whit: assume the risks of failure, embrace your moments of humiliated over-reach; push beyond your comfort zone and competence. That's where the best – by which I mean “most interesting” – writing happens, and it's so much better, so much more joyful, exciting and alive and to be interesting than it is to be competent.
WD-R: Finally, has any dipshit ever, inadvertently, referred to you in an email as Frank instead of Fran and, if so, what are you planning for your, entirely righteous, revenge?
FL: More times than you might think. I did a festival down here (Kent) a couple of years back, where “Frank Lock” went out on all the event posters. I don't actually mind. Those clued into poetry knew who was meant, those not clued in wouldn't care either way. I also like to imagine the alternative life of Frank Lock. I feel like he drives a mini-cab and writes really angry – but also really cryptic – poems about his ex-wife. He still wears one of those boxy leather car coats we thought had disappeared circa 1992. He's also big into deviancy theory. He was the first person from his family to go to university. He got a 2:2 in Media Studies. I feel like Frank might actually be a poetic genius, except he has all the social grace of horny German Shepherd and he sincerely believes that 4G gives you Covid. In another life, we could have been friends.
Essential Information
Here's Fran's album, I think it is called Totally Fucking Disco
And The New Herbal is here
