Podcast Summary: The New Yorker: Poetry

Episode: Patricia Lockwood Reads Elizabeth Bishop

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

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.

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).

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)

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

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.

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.

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)

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).

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.