The New Yorker: Poetry Patricia Lockwood Reads Elizabeth Bishop
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Dec 22, 2025 
Patricia Lockwood, a celebrated poet and novelist known for her sharp humor and keen insight, joins Kevin Young for an engaging discussion about poetry. She shares her fascination with Elizabeth Bishop’s enigmatic poem "In the Waiting Room," exploring its themes of mystery, race, and self-recognition. Lockwood reads her own playful piece, "Love Poem Like We Used to Write It," and delves into the satire of love poetry and the influences of writers like Gertrude Stein. Their conversation weaves between the personal and the poetic, highlighting the complexities of identity and authorship.
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Poetry Needs Mystery
- Patricia Lockwood describes Elizabeth Bishop's 'In the Waiting Room' as a poem of accuracy, spontaneity, and mystery.
- She calls it a perennial poem of mystery that resists easy ownership or summary.
Illness Shapes Perceptual Breaks
- Lockwood links Bishop's waiting-room experience to illness and liminal bodily states like aura or vertigo.
- She points out Bishop omitted illness in the poem though a prose counterpart names scabby body and wheezing lungs.
Global Images Intensify Disorientation
- Lockwood emphasizes the hemispheric and colonial reach of the National Geographic images in Bishop's poem.
- She argues changing the magazine's content to include far places intensifies the poem's world-travel vertigo.