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 the magazine.

The poems were featuring in

this episode also appear in the anthology A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925 to

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.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

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?

This is one of my perennial poems of mystery.

And actually when you asked me on the program, I was like, oh, I'm so sure someone has already done in the waiting room.

Right? Like, it's a classic. She's almost falling over. There's the 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.

Well, why don't we listen to the poem?

Here's Patricia Lockwood, reading In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop.

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.

...