Patricia Lockwood Reads Elizabeth Bishop

Summary

Podcast Summary: The New Yorker: Poetry

Episode: Patricia Lockwood Reads Elizabeth Bishop

Date: December 22, 2025
Host: Kevin Young
Guest: Patricia Lockwood

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Overview

In this episode of The New Yorker Poetry Podcast, poetry editor Kevin Young sits down with acclaimed poet and memoirist Patricia Lockwood to dig deep into Elizabeth Bishop’s iconic poem "In the Waiting Room." Lockwood reads and analyzes Bishop’s work and discusses her own poem, "Love Poem Like We Used To Write it." Their conversation explores themes of identity, self-recognition, poetic form, autobiography, and the ethics of writing about the beloved. The discussion is lively, insightful, and peppered with humor and literary allusions, engaging both fans of Bishop and new readers alike.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why "In the Waiting Room"?

• Selection of the Poem
  • Lockwood calls "In the Waiting Room" a “perennial poem of mystery,” highlighting its combination of accuracy, spontaneity, and the ineffable (02:03).
  • She notes surprise that it hadn’t yet been featured, possibly due to its complex, layered themes.

2. Reading and Analysis of "In the Waiting Room"

• Patricia Lockwood reads the poem in its entirety (02:39–06:16).
• Themes Discussed:
  • Strangeness and Mystery
    • The poem captures a moment of existential self-recognition and the strangeness of being a self among others.
    • Kevin Young observes the sense of strangeness in both Bishop’s observation and self-experience:

      “It has this mystery to it, but it's also about strangeness.” (06:16)

  • The 'Self' and Cultural Self-Awareness
    • Young reflects on Bishop’s realization not just of her own existence but her place in a particular time, place, and culture:

      “She's sort of understanding that she was not just a self in this moment in the mirror, but also...here's my particular time and space.” (08:43)

  • Autobiography and Illness
    • Lockwood connects the poem to Bishop’s prose memoir "The Country Mouse," noting the omission in the poem of Bishop’s own illness. She suggests the poem exists in a “penumbra or post-monitory state of illness” (07:50–08:43).
    • Lockwood shares a personal childhood story mirroring the poem’s moment of self-realization, emphasizing the primal, almost geological sense of time and identity such moments invoke (15:18–17:19).
  • Otherness, Race, and Queerness
    • The conversation turns to issues of exotification, racialized imagery, and queerness as Lockwood highlights the problematic and alluring aspects of the National Geographic depictions:

      “We're talking about a gay woman...a white woman...sort of like, you know, memorize these American anthems instead of the odes to the maple that she had grown up doing.” (11:43)

    • Lockwood notes the identification and discomfort Bishop expresses, drawing connections to contemporary questions of race, gender, and queerness (12:09–12:58).
  • The “O” of Pain
    • Both Lockwood and Young discuss the ambiguity of the “O,” questioning whose pain is voiced and how this triggers Bishop’s sense of self-alienation and identification (13:04–14:24).

3. Bishop and the Confessional Poets

• Restraint vs. Revelation
  • Young discusses the tension between revelation and restraint in Bishop’s work, noting how chaos is boiled down poetically:

    “If you can boil all that down into a villanelle that, you know, there's only one line that confesses, like, an entire thing, then you should do it.” (17:52)

  • Lockwood questions why Bishop is often distinguished from confessional poets when her poems are “profoundly autobiographical and deeply confessional” (17:19–17:48).
• Form and Tact
  • Bishop’s mastery and manipulation of poetic form are acknowledged as a means of channeling emotional excess and managing self-disclosure (19:32).

4. Metaphor, Language, and Reading

• The symbolism of the “big black wave” in the poem is unpacked as vertigo, the weight of the world, and the tumult of self-recognition (22:22–22:47).
• Lockwood and Young ruminate on the parenthetical “I could read,” connecting it to the cusp of knowledge and the boundaries between knowing and unknowing (22:56–23:57).

5. Comparisons with Other Poets

• The episode explores Bishop’s relationships (both literary and personal) to poets like Lowell and her difference from other confessional and formalist poets, as well as her influences (e.g., George Herbert, Baudelaire, Hopkins).

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Mystery and Identity:
  • Patricia Lockwood (about Bishop’s most infamous line):

    “‘You are an I. You are an Elizabeth. You are one of them.’ ...Most people have an experience like this, the looking in the mirror experience, the feeling that you are yourself and why should you be yourself experience.” (07:10)

• On Reading the Poem Today:
  • Kevin Young:

    “You know, it's almost, what, 50 some years later that she's writing this poem. She's sort of understanding that she was not just a self in this moment in the mirror, but also...here's my particular time and space that I'm trying to write about.” (08:43)

• On the Power of the Parenthetical:
  • Patricia Lockwood:

    “That's why ‘I could read’ is such an important parenthetical here... You're just on the cusp. You're on the precipice.” (22:56)

• On the Ethics of Literary Objectification:
  • Patricia Lockwood (on her own poem):

    “Maybe the ethics of trying to fix a love object in text. Like, what are we doing when we write about the beloved?” (33:47)

• On Creative Process and Influence:
  • Patricia Lockwood (on returning to poetry post-Trump and engaging with Plath and Bishop):

    “I got into Sylvia's Collected Poems, and just suddenly it was like a light switch, and just the music was back. It was that private, that personal music.” (38:17)

• Humorous Moment:
  • Patricia Lockwood (on reading her own poem):

    “Isn't that the weirdest thing? What the hell is that? You tell me, Kevin.” (29:55)

    • Kevin Young: “You get in there, you wrote it. You're to blame for all of this.” (29:59)

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Segment Timestamps

• [01:01] – Introduction and guest welcome
• [01:47] – Why "In the Waiting Room"?
• [02:39–06:16] – Lockwood reads "In the Waiting Room"
• [06:16–25:48] – Deep dive conversation: strangeness, self, otherness, autobiography, form, and illness
• [25:48–26:08] – Discussion of Bishop’s place in confessional poetry
• [26:56–27:23] – Switch to Lockwood’s poem, "Love Poem Like We Used To Write it"
• [27:30–29:50] – Lockwood reads her poem
• [29:55–41:14] – Discussion: deconstructing the love poem, objectification, play with form, gender, queerness, and the ethics of depiction
• [41:38–44:14] – On memoir, assignments, and writing under pressure
• [44:46–45:31] – Lockwood discusses her upcoming collection, "Agate Head Stone Soup"
• [45:38–46:06] – Closing remarks and book notes

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Lockwood’s "Love Poem Like We Used To Write it"

• The poem functions as a self-aware, even satirical engagement with traditional love poetry, exploring the construction of the beloved, exoticization, gender, and the slipperiness of meaning.
• Lockwood discusses influences (Bishop, Jane Eyre, Gertrude Stein) and the ethics of “fixing a love object in text” (33:47), tying its method to larger (post)colonial questions of power and representation.

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Reflections on the Writing Process

• Lockwood describes moving between poetry, fiction, and memoir, engaging deeply with form while being occasionally blocked by real-world events (notably, the Trump era).
• She credits reading Plath and Bishop for reigniting her poetic impulse and discusses efforts to merge genres in pursuit of an “all genre” form that allows full inclusion of life’s details.

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Notable Quotes with Attribution & Timestamps

• On Bishop’s signature line, "You are an I. You are an Elizabeth. You are one of them":
  • Patricia Lockwood:

    “I totally disagree [with William Logan]. I think most people have an experience like this, the looking in the mirror experience, the feeling that you are yourself and why should you be yourself experience.” (07:10)

• On the meaning of the “wave”:
  • Patricia Lockwood:

    “It's vertigo. I mean, this is how it feels. But you're right, it is the wave of the world. Right. Like we are in the world at that moment.” (22:34)

• On form and autobiography (Bishop vs. confessional poets):
  • Kevin Young:

    “The tension in Bishop ... is always between revelation and restraint ... you have to have all that chaos. You’ve got to have all the chaos boil down to write it.” (17:52)

• On the process and ethics of writing the beloved:
  • Patricia Lockwood:

    “Can you both write about a beloved and be written about as the beloved?... what are the other objectifications? What are the other ways of fixing and holding people, of holding power over them, of depicting them? Who gets to depict. Right. And who gets to be the depicted?” (33:47)

• On poetic generativity and influence:
  • Patricia Lockwood:

    “I got into Sylvia's Collected Poems, and just suddenly it was like a light switch, and just the music was back.” (38:17)

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Upcoming Works

• Lockwood shares details about her upcoming double poetry collection, "Agate Head Stone Soup," written in the invigorating wake of immersing herself in Plath and Bishop, and guided by a playful, genre-blending, autobiographical approach (44:49–45:31).

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Conclusion

This episode juxtaposes Elizabeth Bishop’s canonical, mysterious poem of identity with Patricia Lockwood’s playful and critical reworking of love poetry. Both the analysis and the poems themselves probe what it means to recognize oneself, to write the self, and to navigate the boundaries between subject and object—whether in the dentist’s waiting room or the lines of a self-aware love poem. The episode serves as an invitation to revisit Bishop in a contemporary light, and to explore Lockwood’s innovative contributions to poetry today.

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Transcript

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[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

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[Kevin Young]

Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker Magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss. Then they read one of their own poems that's been published in a magazine. The poems we're featuring in this episode also appear in the anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025, available for purchase from the New Yorker store wherever you buy books Today, my guest is Patricia Lockwood. She's published two poetry collections, two novels and a memoir. She's won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and she's a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. Tricia, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[Kevin Young]

So the first poem you've chosen to read is in the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop. Why this poem? What drew you to it in the anthology?

[Patricia Lockwood]

This is one of my perennial poems of mystery. And actually when you asked me on.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

The program, I was like, oh, I'm so sure someone has already done in.

[Patricia Lockwood]

The Waiting Room, right? Like, it's a classic. She's almost falling over. There's National Geographic, there's everything. But I was told that no one had grabbed it yet. Maybe because it's complicated. I think we'll probably discuss that a little bit later. But she spoke of the necessary qualities of poetry for it to be a real poem. A poem should have accuracy, spontaneity and mystery. And this is one that I believe in the Waiting Room really has.

[Kevin Young]

Well, why don't we Listen to the poem. Here's Patricia Lockwood reading in the waiting Room By Elizabeth Bishop.

[Patricia Lockwood]

In the waiting.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Room in Worcester, Massachusetts.

[Patricia Lockwood]

I went with Aunt Consuelo to keep.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Her dentist's appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist's waiting room. It was winter. It got dark early.

[Patricia Lockwood]

The waiting room was full of grown.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Up people, arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines. My aunt was inside what seemed like a long time, and while I waited I read the National Geographic. I could read and carefully studied the photographs. The inside of a volcano, black and full of ashes. Then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire. OSA and Martin Johnson, dressed in riding.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Breeches, laced boots and pith helmets.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

A dead man slung on a pole. Long pig, the caption said. Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string. Black naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. I read it right straight through. I was too shy to stop. And then I looked at the COVID the yellow margins, the date. Suddenly from inside came an O of pain, Aunt Consuela's voice, not very loud or long. I wasn't at all surprised, yet even then I knew she was a foolish, timid woman. I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me, my voice in my mouth without thinking at all. I was my foolish aunt. I We were falling, falling, our eyes glued to the COVID of the National Geographic. February 1918. I said to myself, Three days and you'll be seven years old. I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turning world into cold, blue, black space. But I felt you are an I. You are an Elizabeth. You are one of them. Why should you be one too? I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was. I gave a sidelong glance. I couldn't look any higher at shadowy gray knees, trousers and skirts and boots and different pairs of hands lying under the lamps. I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger could ever happen. Why should I be my aunt? Or me or anyone? What similarities, Boots, hands, the family voice I felt in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts held us all together or made us all just one.

[Podcast Producer/Host Announcer]

How?

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

I didn't know any word for it. How unlikely. How had I come to be here like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse, but hadn't? The waiting room was bright and too hot. It was sliding beneath a big Black wave, another and another. Then I was back in it. The war was on. Outside in Worcester, Massachusetts, were night and slush and cold, and it was still the 5th of February, 1918.

[Kevin Young]

That was in the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop, which was originally published in the July 17, 1971 issue of the New Yorker. It's so amazing to hear you read that, but also to think back, you know, 50 some years to this poem, which still seems, as you point out, kind of strange. It has this mystery to it, but it's also about strangeness.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah.

[Kevin Young]

Bishop observing what she sees as strange. And these figures that I think are sort of troubling to us. Maybe now, maybe then in National Geographic, but then also she herself feels strange. I was, she says, you are an I. You are an Elizabeth. You are one of them. You know, all these italicized. Why should you be one, too? I scarcely dared to look to see what it was. I was. How do you reckon with these kinds of strangeness that Bishop's trying to, I think, write about?

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah, it's interesting because William Logan hates that line. He says that it's one of her few false notes. And I totally disagree. I think most people have an experience like this, the looking in the mirror experience, the feeling that you are yourself and why should you be yourself experience. So it was first written, I think, in 1970, around the time that she wrote Crusoe in England. So these are late, masterful sort of form breaking poems. I think that Crusoe in England was also in the New Yorker, was it not?

[Kevin Young]

That's right.

[Patricia Lockwood]

I was quite surprised to not find it in the anthology. But anyway, so we have rarely, you know, in the case of something like this, we have a prose counterpart.

[Kevin Young]

Sure.

[Patricia Lockwood]

And this is the Country Mouse, which was a biographical sketch that she wrote about 10 years earlier. And some of the same lines are in it. The war is on, it's the same visit to the dentist. The aunt's name is different. So in this poem it's Consuelo. Right. Which is maybe, you know, a product of her time in Brazil. But in the Country Mouse, it's Aunt Jenny. Right. But the major facts are the same, except that in the poem she doesn't include the fact that she was ill at the time. So biographically she was suffering terribly from eczema and asthma. You know, she was taking shots of adrenaline. So for me, this poem takes place in the aura or the penumbra or the premonitory or post monitory state of illness of that strangeness. Do you have a moment where you realized, Kevin, that you were Kevin, and why should you be Kevin, too? What was your moment like?

[Kevin Young]

About six minutes ago, when we started this podcast, I was like, what is happening? Who am I? I mean, honestly, I'm not sure I had it in the same way. Because at least from her understanding, there's a bit of a. I mean, I think some of this is both. Absolutely. You're right. There's a self that finally realizes it's a self. But there's also a kind of cultural self that I feel like she is undergoing in this poem where she realizes that she's in Worcester, and she kind of over says it at the end. Again, it's outside in Worcester, where night and slush and cold, and it was still the 5th of February at the end. And this idea of, like, realizing that. And I think, you know, it's almost, what, 50 some years later that she's writing this poem. She's sort of understanding that she was not just a self in this moment in the mirror, but also, like, I'm a product of time and space, and here's my particular time and space that I'm trying to write about. And this idea of also waiting. She's waited this long to write about it, but it's also this moment of waiting for something else, I think.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Yeah.

[Patricia Lockwood]

And in the poem, she essentially falls off the edge of the world. So to find herself back in her body, back in Worcester, and it's still that day. That's what I think really sends that line home. So we have another fun little fact, which is that she says that this poem was taken almost completely from life, except that she changed the National Geographics. The one that she was actually perusing in the waiting room was one about Alaska. It was called the Valley of 10,000 Smokes. But she said that, I think, in a letter to Frank Bedard. She said that there was a later one that year, still 1918, that made more of an impression on her. And I think that people have hunted it down and looked up. You know, here's the article. Here's the babies, pointed heads. This is this cultural phenomenon. Here are these women, you know, with their necks wound round. And you think about it, and she's like, what does she do in this poem that places it in the world, right? So I think if she had kept cold on cold, Worcester, Massachusetts and Alaska, we don't get that sense, right, of the roundness of the world, of the hemispheres, of her traveling exotifying, right, Leaving for that other place and feeling then that the poem is located in the planet, in both hemispheres, all around. And that. That is the disorienting journey that she goes on here.

[Kevin Young]

Well, what do you think about this part, though, where she says. I mean, that image of the necks of light bulbs is really intense and feels like, accurate. But their breaths were horrifying. I read it right straight through. Because it seemed like all three of those are important. This light bulb, which, of course, is this almost cliche of knowledge. And then, you know, their breaths were horrifying. I read it right straight through. I mean, there's a kind of. It's not horrifying in the I closed the book way. It's in the, oh, my God, I gotta see more of it. I mean, how do you take that?

[Patricia Lockwood]

You gotta keep. Yeah. I mean, we are talking about a gay woman. We're talking about a white woman. We're talking about a woman who had just been transferred from her family in Nova Scotia to a different country and was now being told to act and be American and sort of like, you know, memorize these American anthems instead of the odes to the maple that she had grown up doing. So I think all of that is interesting. And then the line after that, I.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Was too shy to stop.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Right. I think that that is really the crux there. That's where it turns for me that she. There is this fascination that it's not necessarily even just exotification, but there's even stirrings of desire of some adult life, I think. You know, as women or people with breasts. You know, like you grow up reading the National Geographic or you see a glimpse of a nursing mother one day and you're like, oh, no, that's going to be me. Is that going to be me in my life? Why should I be one of them? Why should I be one of them, too? So there's this identification. There's also something else, like a reaching out and a yearning toward. I think probably the reason no one's chosen this poem before now is because it is racialized, it is complex. I do think it is also about queerness. And then there's this matter, too, of.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

What actually happens in the poem.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Right. So when you hear that O, when you first read this poem, where does it come from? Who says it?

[Kevin Young]

That's a great question. I think I just was with her, and honestly, I think I read it long enough ago that I think even the subject that we're talking about now of what causes her to have this alienation from the self or recognition, it's A sort of simultaneous thing. I don't think we even spoke about that. So it was almost like here you are with Elizabeth Bishop in this kooky waiting room. And so I appreciate you outlining for us some of how you see. Because I think it is both like the experience she's having in the waiting room. Both thought about self conscious and also kind of unwilled, you know. And I think her experience in the world is often like that. I mean, you know, I think back to some of her earlier poems and like Songs for a Colored Singer, I think that's the title of it, which I don't enjoy because I get taken out of them because I don't think they're as good as others blues of any hue. So it's interesting to sort of encounter her trying to wrestle, I think, with race, the exotic, the other, but also really with this self. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me, my voice in my mouth. I mean, I assumed as she, you know, you're sort of believing her that oh, it's an O from someone else. But now it's an O of her.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah. And I always placed it there, I thought. I think. Cause I had had a similar experience, which I'll recount in a moment. I really felt her sliding sideways with the waves going over her head. And I always sort of pictured it in my mind. She thinks she's overhearing Aunt Consuelo, you know, like a nerve being touched by the hook by the dentist in the back or something. But in reality she makes this noise as she undergoes this state. And then she experiences this process of identification. So for me, I was, I think about the same age. And it was also in a sort of state of illness. Post illness I had had like an allergic reaction, been taken to the hospital and I had come home and I was stand bundled up in my snow gear. Maybe these things happen more in winter, who knows. And I rolled a sort of. I rolled an acorn downhill and I saw that it made this deep blue.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Impression in the snow.

[Patricia Lockwood]

And then I looked up and there was like leaping above it a fully grown oak tree that I felt had not been there before. So I experienced a lapse of absolute time in this moment. I rolled the acorn down the hill, I saw the impression, I looked up and I saw the leap of the tree. And I thought I. I just experienced geological time, right? This is like the creation of the world in a person. I want to say I was between like five and six. So she is six and she's three days from turning seven. I believe in reality. And there's something about that age. It's like the age of reason. Right. Seven, the age of reason, where it's like, you're going to have something like this. And then I think also when we get to the end of the poem, it really carries us not just in the fact that the war was on, that she is thinking globally, also about those movements, that she's receiving news from the four corners every morning, but also that we're in the middle of the pandemic as well. Right. And I don't think that that is probably remarked upon. So ever since I got ill in 2020 and sort of experienced those post viral effects, you become like a Sherlock about these things and you're like, what's this? What's this? This feels like an aura. Is this person experiencing like a seizure or a migraine or something, you know, that is out of the common realm. We have a really interesting line in the Country Mouse, the sort of the prose counterpart. I was one of them, too, inside my scabby body and wheezing lungs. So if that had been in the poem, then it's like, you know, the infirmity of Consuelo or the difference of those women. She's also identified with those. She's part of the league of those as being different, other compromised as she feels it. And the end of it is really great. It was like coasting downhill, this thought.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Only much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree. Why was I a human being?

[Kevin Young]

Wow.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah, it's wild. This is one of those things. So we have this perennial question with Elizabeth Bishop where it's like, why do we try to keep her distinct from the confessional poets? We try to protect her from the label. Right. So Helen Vendler, she talks about it and she's like, well, you know, she wasn't really a confessional poet. She didn't write autobiographically. She did, maybe more profound. I mean, she wasn't writing about her tampons. But this is a profoundly autobiographical and deeply confessional work.

[Podcast Producer/Host Announcer]

Sure.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Is it? Because she wasn't writing about her relationships. Like, what do you think it is?

[Kevin Young]

Well, I think the tension in Bishop, for me at least, is always between revelation and restraint. And what people, I think, maybe get wrong in either way is they'll read her, as you said, as sort of too confessional or they'll want to put her in that, or the reader, you know. And I saw writers, especially when, who were trying to follow in her footsteps and they would only just focus on the restraint. And it's like, well, you have to have all that chaos. You've got to have all the chaos boil down to write it, you know, and if you can do that, if you can boil all that down into a villanelle that, you know, there's only one line that confesses, like, an entire thing, then you should do it. I mean, if you can be as restrained as she is, but it's because she needs to be. I mean, I feel that, you know, I think people really read her for a long time for that kind of restraint in. And you could even read this poem and that, oh, in the face of war, a young woman confronts her own self, you know, as opposed to when time disappears. And you are, quote, waiting. You know, what are you waiting for? What is she waiting for? And to me, it's adulthood. A sense of self that is both part of a family and well beyond a family. And that kind of tension. And I love you shining a light on a lot of that.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah. And the fact that she's waiting for a family member, waiting to step into her shoes. I think in the Country Mouse, she's Aunt Jenny, but I believe in real life, her. Her name is Florence Bishop, and she would often change names and sublimate that sort of thing. Yeah. So I think that that was part of this idea of her, like, sublime tact.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

But if you look at the poets.

[Patricia Lockwood]

She loved, it's like George Herbert, Baudelaire, Hopkins. These are like poets of emotional excess in many cases. So is the tension her own tension where she's fighting her deep, like, well of feeling? Right. Is it the fact that she didn't write about relationships? Is it the fact that she wrote in form? What relationship does form have with our view of her 50 years onward?

[Kevin Young]

I think it's interesting because this one, as you point out, is a late entry that doesn't have that same feel of form, but it is about kind of formality. And I feel that in the Moose, too, which I did put in the book. And let me tell you, there's a whole other podcast about how do you choose between the Bishop you have at hand, not to mention the Plath and everyone else? And they, I think, end up with some of the most selections in the anthology. Rightly so. But I think what's interesting is the way that the moose say it's kind of about ordinary life then being transformed by this glimpse of a moose, you know, and how that here is both the glimpse of this world, as you put it in the magazine, but then also this view of the self, you know, And I think that's one of her many subjects is about. You know, I love Filling Station, which I end up reading a lot, you know, and it has a similar quality where these passersby are recognizing but not recognizing, you know, and she as this poetic I eye and uppercase. I notice all the details, somewhat humorous about this filling station, but also that what's behind it, the invisible hand behind all of this. And I think there's something in that, in her work.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah. And, you know, what I'm seeing right now with several of these poems, with the moose, even with Crusoe, certainly with this one, is they're retrospective. You end on a note of having gone somewhere. So with the moose, the acrid smell of gasoline. You know, in the filling station, somebody loves us all. And in this, it's like we're restored back to that day, to that place that we left. And with a feeling of a journey that has been gone on. And like in Crusoe in England, it's like it's all retrospective. It's like a life described really as like a sort of archipelago. I always think of it as, you know, the chain of islands itself. The way that poem is told is like the grouping of the islands. And I think she often does things like that, maybe go a little bit unnoticed. I was very tempted, you know, to do Filling Station as well. But I think it would have been easier, I think, in the Waiting Room as a harder poem. It's harder to think about, harder to grapple with. And it's harder to think about its mystery. Right. Because of those complications.

[Kevin Young]

Yeah. I have to ask you, what's that wave doing there? The waiting room was bright and too hot. It was sliding beneath a big black wave. Another and another.

[Patricia Lockwood]

It's vertigo. I mean, this is how it feels. But you're right, it is the wave of the world. Right. Like we are in the world at that moment. Have you ever experienced anything like that? Like that, sort of. Have you ever. Almost, like, grayed out or something?

[Kevin Young]

I think some version of that, yes. But I also think it's kind of. It's emotional to me. Not just.

[Patricia Lockwood]

It is, yeah. And it's also a sense of times and populations and peoples and not knowingness. That's why I could read is such an important parenthetical here. You're just on the cusp. You're on the precipice. I could read, but she doesn't know any of this yet. She feels these waves of Unknowledge of intimations sliding over her. Right? Yeah.

[Kevin Young]

And reading is such an interesting phenomenon, and we could talk all day about this, but I think this idea of reading, you know, we have such a limited notion of it, and you've written, I think, wonderfully about this idea of coming to reading and, like, the sense of learning there's a world out there through the word. And I think there's more for me to think through on what that parenthetical, as you point out, is doing. And her other parenthetical write it. It's almost the opposite of reading, but it's so tied. Like, okay, there's this whole other stuff. It's almost brackets. It's like, there's something in there that's a whole world.

[Patricia Lockwood]

I agree. And so William Logan's like, you are an I. You are an Elizabeth. This rings falls to me. I never liked write trouble with that line. I know. And it's everyone's favorite. And I'm like, okay, so this represents the difficulty to me. A lot of times, it's the line that you yourself wouldn't be able to write or you wouldn't be able to leave. Right. You might write it in the initial draft and then think, that's too much, and that's its power. And so I still have discomfort with that line, though, weirdly not. You are an I. You are an Elizabeth.

[Kevin Young]

Well, and they all have these italicized portions, which are these emphasized things. And, you know, I think what's interesting is, you know, Lowell, who is so much her friend and foil and so alike and so different. They both, I think, are poets who are understanding their role in society, but it's almost the opposite. Like, I feel like Lowell was wrestling always with his family, and trying to understand the self in the family here is almost like, wait, I have a family? Like, there's this kind of moment where she says, you know, held us all together or made us all just one. Like, what similarities? Like, wait, hold on. Because it's almost not just she realizes that she's an I, but as we said, like, she realizes she's part of this. This family, community, race, culture, nation. I mean, it's almost a telescoping of all of this understanding and where does she belong?

[Patricia Lockwood]

You know, being shuffled around to different family members being, you know, molested by an uncle, this sort of thing. What is your sense of home? What is your sense of your place in the world? Now Lowell really gets sl. Big time with the confessional thing. They're like, you did this. But if you go back and read Life Studies, that's not what you think it's gonna be at all. When's the last time you reread Life Studies? It is so much of almost just like family portraits.

[Kevin Young]

He's holding up these pictures literally. And you know, he tells you in the title he's not a Lowell's not like always for subtlety, you know, he's like notebook history, you know, like he's telling you like what his subject is. But that's not always, you know, when a poet says that, you gotta look left or right, you have to look left.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah, that's right. That's right.

[Kevin Young]

They're like not always telling you the whole thing. More from my conversation with Patricia Lockwood after the break.

[David Remnick]

Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Kevin Young]

Trisha, welcome back.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Thank you.

[Kevin Young]

Now, in our November 28, 2011 issue, the new Yorker published your poem, Love Poem Like We Used To Write it, which we'll hear you read in a moment. Is there anything you want to say about the poem first, anything listeners might like to know before we hear it?

[Patricia Lockwood]

No. You're going to find out everything you need to know. As I rediscover it. I don't think I've read this poem out loud probably in at least five years. So this contains some tongue twisters and we're going to see how I do.

[Kevin Young]

Great. Here's Patricia Lockwood reading her poem, Love poem like we used to write it.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Love poem like we used to write.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

It says, here is a girl who gets written like palms says, here is a girl who moves paint like Tahiti teeth infinite white and infinite medi and.

[Patricia Lockwood]

With them she infinite eat me and.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Mouth full of invert and cane and coarse sugar. And her dresses all came from across the water, and they rode a light chop on the sea in fast ships.

[Patricia Lockwood]

And she owns 20 pairs of the.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Shape of her hands and slash silk on her shoulder like claws of a parrot. And here the love poem delights. The word parrot will never be replaced.

[Patricia Lockwood]

And will continue meaning always exactly what.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

It means as none of the words in this sentence have done. Come read me again in a hundred years and see how I keep my shape.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Love poem.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Back to your subject. The word parrot is not the right woman for you. Hard to hold and too much red. Love poem. Think long arms and flies nowhere. I remember her now. It says and says she is far from me. Says here how her voice is a western slope when west meant the sun. It rose and set there and monstrous the shadows of flowers all down it. In the days before voice meant something you wrote with. Love poem as we used to write it says her small brown paw is adorable, which is to say brown as we used to use it, which is to say just sunburned, just monstrous, the shadows of flowers all on it, which is to say paw as we used to use it, which is to say a human hand. And human as we used to use it, which is to say almost no one among us. Blonde, of course, and blonde. Blonde as a coil of rope. And someone hauled on her somewhere and loop after loop flew out of her helpless. The someone was out at sea and language on my shoulder like claws of a parrot. I sailed the world over to deliver one letter, one letter of even one letter, one word and one word as we used to use it in those days. She was the only lady in those days. She wrote a small round hand and I hauled on it, saw it fly loop by loop out of her.

[Kevin Young]

That was love poem like we used to write it by Patricia Lockwood.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Isn't that the weirdest thing? What the hell is that? You tell me, Kevin.

[Kevin Young]

You get in there, you wrote it. You're to blame for all of this.

[Patricia Lockwood]

I frickin wrote it.

[Kevin Young]

If you have to explain it to us now go.

[Patricia Lockwood]

I sort of. No, I think that I do a bishopian, Bishoprian bishoprician thing here.

[Kevin Young]

Yes.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Where I make the love poem itself a standing oracle. Who's speaking? I'm writing from inside the love poem. And it's also sort of satirical.

[Kevin Young]

Yes.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Right. I think I was probably reading like some Jane Eyre sort of like 19th century novels where it's like these sunburned brown paws and these like they're gloves and everyone's blonde and like this ideal of womanhood.

[Kevin Young]

Yes.

[Patricia Lockwood]

I do think it's kind of like a weird, queer textual poem that is like looking at the tradition of the love poem and thinking, what the hell is this? Like dissecting it a little bit. What are we doing here exactly?

[Kevin Young]

Well, I think the we is important in the poem, needless to say, because we have this we but then there's really this she. And I think the poem, for me, really takes off when it says, and she owns 20 pairs of the shape of her hands and slashed silk, you know, and you start to see this portrait of not just, you know, and not even perhaps a self, but of someone's echo, you know. And, you know, I think it is tied to notions of the feminine in the poem and what that means. Why? Says, here is a girl who gets written like palms. Says, here is a girl who moves paint like Tahiti. I mean, these are referring, I think, to the kinds of exoticization we were talking about and a kind of, you know, objectifying that isn't as interesting as the rest of the poem makes. The self and the she and the foreignness of both.

[Patricia Lockwood]

I think it's sort of this subject is like, who gets written about and who writes.

[Kevin Young]

Yes.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Who's in charge? Right? Who ends up being in charge in.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Those days, she was the only lady.

[Patricia Lockwood]

In those days. She wrote a small round hand. And I hauled on it, saw it.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

Fly loop by loop out of her.

[Patricia Lockwood]

So this eye that appears suddenly is the one doing this. We're extracting this speech, this from the lady, the small round hand. It's just very interesting. It's one of those things that, like, if I looked at this now, I'm like, oh, God, what a nightmare. Like, what gave me the idea that I was gonna be able to do this? The tongue twistery. Ness. Sometimes when you're writing a book, you get into a place of deep play. And I think in motherland, fatherland, homeland, sexuals, which is really about gender. It's really a lot about text, about writing, a lot about queerness, a lot about who writes a lot about who, you know, ends up producing the documents. I go very deeply into the text itself. So I get into a place of play where it's like, that's the entire poem. Like, the exercise is the thing itself. And then you kind of come out of at the end, like you were just in a trance, and you're like, well, what? What is this exactly? What in my trance did I deliver? Like, what monologue did I deliver? What did I say?

[Kevin Young]

Well, it's interesting because I also think it suggests that love poems do that in a way, for good and for ill, that to write, or at least to experience a love poem and to, like, be inside this place of both delusion and not exactness, a kind of, I don't know, a place just monstrous, the shadows of flowers all on it, you know, that's not the same as flowers. It's the shadows of flowers and it's all on it, which is to say paw, as we used to use it, which is to say a human hand and human, as we used to use it, which is to say almost no one among us. There's a kind of almost quality of like, finding the document. You know, a future civilization discovers love poetry and goes, what is this odd tradition?

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yes. And I think it's about, I don't know, maybe the ethics of trying to fix a love object in text. Like, what are we doing when we write about the beloved? Can you both write about a beloved and be written about as the beloved? I mean, when you're writing a poem like this, you're like, I would typically be the ob. Object of this. Right. It's the old, like, Robert Graves, Laura riding conundrum of like, you can't both. You can't be the white goddess, you know, as a woman. Like, you can only. You can't be all three of those things. Like, you have to choose one thing. So it's this incredible complication. But then when you think about that, you're like, well, what are the other objectifications? What are the other ways of fixing and holding people, of holding power over them, of depicting them? Who gets to depict. Right. And who gets to be the depicted?

[Kevin Young]

Well, and you have parrot here.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah.

[Kevin Young]

You know, instead of Bishop's italics, we have the love poem delights. The word parrot in quotes will never be replaced and will continue meaning always exactly what it means, as none of the words in this sentence have done.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah.

[Kevin Young]

So there's a kind of. Only the parrot, which, of course is an animal that, you know, echoes, but doesn't necessarily, you know, depending how you think, create language in some way. Isn't that fascinating? You know, like, how do you. How does this parrot come into play? But then also, you know, it's. It's unique. It's not like the lady or even the love poem, which can't even do that. Can't even say what it means.

[Patricia Lockwood]

And we're traveling over the world as well. So the real sort of movement in the poem, we sort of start with the palms. We have Tahiti. We ride a light chop on the sea in fast ships. We are. We are, you know, sort of, we're moving sugar. We're moving silk. We've got a palm pirate on board. He's got a parrot. So there's almost this, like, logic of, like, what would happen if we take this all the way, if we follow the Initial image, which is a lot of times the thing back then that I would do, I would start with an initial image and then I would just go and I would unroll the logic, like, not really asking any questions and seeing where it ended up. And sometimes, you know, it ended up at a place that was, well, what the hell was that? Right. Or even something uncomfortable like, why. Why am I writing about this? Right. Like, you know, colonization and like. Right. An empire. Why is this? But I. I think that they're to do with each other. I think that trying to possess beauty, I think that trying to possess a person's love, I think that trying to write about a person so that they're recognizable, these are a little bit projects of empire too, right? Of owning a person. And they felt instinctually to me, as a person who was not really educated in any of these fields, that they had to do with each other. So I just rode the whole way on intuition. And that's what I would do. And I would be like, do we get somewhere interesting? I do feel like we got somewhere interesting in this poem. I think it's very melodic. I think it's interesting to read. It doubles back a lot on itself. There's a lot of the examination of the previous line that you see in someone like Bishop as well.

[Kevin Young]

What about Stein? Blonde, of course, and blonde. Blond is a coil of rope. I mean, that's very Stein.

[Patricia Lockwood]

It's very Steinian.

[Kevin Young]

Does she do that for you or. Or is this your Stein by way of the many other folks who find her?

[Patricia Lockwood]

No, no. You're bringing me back. So I wrote this in an apartment in Stuart, Florida. My husband worked nights at a newspaper, which is something that will make you think about text as well, and putting text to bed. And I was. I do believe I read the autobiography of Alice B. Toklas around that time, which is like a much straighter narrative or a more straightforward narrative than people, but also contains those sort of repetitions or characteristics, sort of foldings that we come to expect from Gertrude Stein. So I think that's smart. I think that that was exactly contemporaneous with that.

[Kevin Young]

Well, and it's also what I find fascinating about that. Of course, it's a refracted autobiography. I mean, she ventriloquizes. Barret comes to mind, you know, in the voice of her partner, Toklas, and then. But all about her. What a wild talk about confessional, not confessional. And I'm curious about your relationship to autobiography, but also really genre. You write poems, you write fiction, you Write nonfiction. Do you sit down and think, this is a poem today, or you're in the midst of poetry and when does it decide?

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah, so I'm in a poetry place right now, and it began this spring. I was working on a Sylvia Plath piece for the London Review of Books, and I was like, well, I'm going to have to do the whole thing, right? Like, when you're writing about Sylvia Plath, you're like, well, everyone has already said their piece on Sylvia Plath. You got to get in there. You have to read everything. You have to really experience this. And I believe that I read the Collected Poems last, and I hadn't written really any poetry since probably 2016, since Donald Trump came into office. I think a lot of poets around that time experienced a dampening of the music, of individual, private music, because our heads were so full of other clamoring voices at the time. So a lot of people I knew were having a difficult time, and I hadn't really written a poem since about that era. And so I got into Sylvia's Collected Poems, and just suddenly it was like a light switch, and just the music was back. It was that private, that personal music. And I started writing poems like crazy, like two, three poems a day in the, you know, grand old Sylvia Plath sty. And about the time that I was done with her, I thought, who else is that generative? Who else is the person that, if you're reading one of their poems, you know, you're gonna get an idea and you're gonna hear that music. And it was Bishop. And so that's what I moved on to. And then I did her all summer long and was working on her and the confessional poets. And so I think that I was a person who was never really able to change gears. If I was writing fiction, I wasn't writing poetry. If I was writing memoir, I wasn't writing anything. But in the new poems, I thought, maybe there's a way to break through to something. Was thinking of as the all genre, right? There is some place where you're doing all of it. I'm writing about Sylvia Plath. I'm writing about myself. She's teaching me to write poems again. Is there some form where we can get it all in there? And this is what I attempted to do, I think, before I did try to keep certain things out. You think that you're not necessarily going to put in an anecdote or something overheard or a memory. And then you think, well, what if you did? You know, what if you let all of those things in. What would that form look like? And so I kind of came to something new that felt different to me. It did feel autobiographical. It felt even like the novel that I just wrote refracted kind of through a different lens or with different music or different interpretation.

[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

And it felt so much better than.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Writing that other stuff. Like, how do you do it? Can you do it all at the same time?

[Kevin Young]

I tend to work on different things at once. And I. You know, it's not like I'm with my left hand writing prose in my right hand.

[Patricia Lockwood]

I wish.

[Kevin Young]

Exactly. But it tends to go in bursts, I think, you know, I'll be on a jag with something, and, you know, then I'll have, like, an assignment or a deadline. And suddenly I turn and, you know, and of course, you look back and you go, oh. You know, that was in the midst of working on my own poems. And suddenly it's a feedback loop. And so I actually like that because if I get stuck, which, you know, you just pick up the other thing and mess with that, or you get sick of it. You get sick of. I do my own voice in this particular way or research. When I'm writing a big nonfiction thing, I think the memoir, that's a whole different territory.

[Patricia Lockwood]

It is.

[Kevin Young]

How did you feel working on that? Which all of your books have done so well and gotten well received, but it's such a different task.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah. So Priest Daddy, that was the break. So I had written Motherland, Fatherland, Homeland, Sexuals, and was very happy in this period. Yes. Poems with a little bit. Some of them were a little bit more prosy or broken into, like, lyric essay type forms. But Priest Daddy, which I started writing, I want to say, in 2015 and released in 2017, it was like, I had to do it. I had to save our butts. Like, we had no money. I had this stupid story in my back pocket about this big, naked priest who raised me. And I was like, okay, this is my one shot to kind of get us out of the gutter here. My husband, you know, has developed this, like, rare eye problem. Have to move back in with my parents. This is what I can do. And it was like the poems got quiet, right? Because I was doing something that I had to do, and I was doing it to the utmost of my ability. I was putting poetry in there as much as I could. There are chapters in it that I believe are poetry, but it also just kind of. It shut the door on that. Just like, quiet, lullaby, rocking. That is going on at all times. You know, you can always step into that room and put yourself down on the waves and allow yourself to be rocked and allow yourself to dream. And that's the place where the poet. And if you have a deadline, it's not necessarily. You know, it's not gonna make allowances for that kind of dream world or dream life.

[Kevin Young]

Well, deadlines are so interesting because I think they can be really useful.

[Patricia Lockwood]

I agree.

[Kevin Young]

And, you know, it's a little like, form, you know, like, it can feel daunting. It can feel like it's gonna make artificial ness. But I think it can. Your love poem. The love poem is a form. And so to take it apart like you have here, or to take apart the memoir and put it back together for whatever ends, I think can be so useful because you learn so much about both the form and the self.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yeah. And I think that's true, especially for me with assignments as well. I never thought, oh, I'm gonna love to get so much homework for the rest of my life. But I fucking loved it. Sorry. I don't know if I can cuss. But I was really. I was very happy. I was like, okay. I was never gonna write this essay about Muriel Spark if they didn't come to me and force me to do this or just, like, John Updike or something like that. But if I'm told what to do, some ultra conscious conscientiousness kicks in. And I'm like, I'm gonna read that fucker to the ends of the earth. Now that I know I can cuss.

[Kevin Young]

Yeah. Shouldn't have said you can curse. You don't. It's not required to curse.

[Patricia Lockwood]

So then, I don't know, there's something about it where I'm like, I'm gonna cover every patch, every acre of ground. I'm gonna dive down all these rabbit holes because I didn't get that education. I wanna make sure that I'm being thorough. I wanna make sure that I'm up to the standard. You know, it's almost like an adrenaline or fueled feeling where on the go. And I have to do this thing and I have to do it properly. So I experienced that also with the essays. But then it's like you just wish that there were some parallel life where you could do that. And then also underneath or to the side, always be writing these poems as well.

[Kevin Young]

And so you have these new poems. Will you tell us about them quickly?

[Patricia Lockwood]

Oh, my gosh, yes. Okay. So I have a new book coming out next year. Agate Head Stone Soup. And it's a double collection and they are a little autobiographical. And I kind of did get the directive from Sylvia Plath. She's like, you're gonna write em longhand. You're gonna wake up in the morning, you're gonna write them longhand, you're gonna put everything in and you're not gonna mess with them too much and you're gonna tell other people that you're doing it.

[Kevin Young]

Wow.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yes. So there I had these three rules and I was like, all right, I'm doing this in real time. It was an amazing experience like nothing else I've ever undergone. And I think the poems are so interesting and so different. And I'm release this book.

[Kevin Young]

Well, we're looking forward to it. Tricia, thanks so much for talking with me today.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Thanks so much for having me, Kevin.

[Kevin Young]

Love poem Like We Used To Write it by Patricia Lockwood as well as Elizabeth Bishop's in the Waiting Room can be found on newyorker.com and in the anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025, out now. Elizabeth Bishop's poems was published in 2011. Patricia Lockwood's latest book is Will There Ever Be Another your.

[Podcast Producer/Host Announcer]

To listen to new poetry from the New Yorker, as well as narrated fiction, reporting, criticism, and more. Download the New Yorker app. For more New Yorker literary audio, try the New Yorker Fiction Podcast or the Writer's Voice, which presents new fiction read by the authority author. You can find those and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. Let us know what you think of this podcast by rating and reviewing it in your podcast app, and please follow the show so that you don't miss new episodes. The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is Produced by John LeMay with help from Hannah Eisenman. The theme music is the Corner by Chief Zion Attunde Adjua, courtesy of Stretch Music and Ropedote. Thanks for listening.

[Patricia Lockwood]

If you're a reader or even an aspirational reader, I hope you'll join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker. Each week on this show we make sense of what's happening in the culture.

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[Kevin Young]

And because we're culture critics, we just love to go back to the the text.

[Patricia Lockwood]

Yes. So if books are for you, Critics at Large just might be for you as well. Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker every Thursday.

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[Poetry Reader (Patricia Lockwood)]

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