Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is

Thursday, February 8, 2024. It's the birthday of American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Today,

we'll be reading one of her poems, in the waiting room. And this seemed like an appropriate poem.

Because in it, the speaker, who is a young Elizabeth Bishop,

finds a special significance in realizing and focusing on the fact or reality of her birthday.

It's a long one, so I'll read it just once, but before I do make mention of the thing I like most about this poem, which is it is a wrestling with, or maybe even

a capturing of the moment that the speaker realizes.

She is both a self, an individual eye, and that she has this inescapable link or relationship

to the other, that she becomes not only aware of her own individual self, but immediately

is also weighed down by the discovery that she is connected in

an indissoluble way to not only her mother, her aunt, the women of her own family,

but women, period.

And there is a kind of dizzying effect that this realization has on her, and she's able to stave it off

initially by focusing upon herself as an I, as an Elizabeth. But what I love about the poem

is that it doesn't allow us to get off that easily. The solution is not so clean or

one-sided. The poem closes with the war on, obviously, the literal war still going on in February of

1918, but also the war inside Elizabeth, the continuing tension between the self, the eye, and the other, between the unique individual and the

larger community that Bishop is both a participant in and an inheritor of.

Here is in the waiting room.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, I went with Aunt Consuelo to keep her dentist's appointment

and sat and waited for her in the dentist waiting room.

It was winter. It got dark early.

...