Kevin Young

speaker

1,056 appearances 8 recordings 4 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 26 Aug

Kevin Young’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.

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The New Yorker: Poetry · Richard Blanco Reads Elizabeth Bishop · 29 Jul 2026 podcast

Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, it's great to have you.

So the first poem you've chosen to read is Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop.

What was it about this particular poem that caught your attention when you were looking through the archives?

Sounds perfect.

Here's Richard Blanco reading Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop.

That was Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop, which was originally published in the January 21st, 1956 issue of The New Yorker.

Wow.

You know, hearing you read it, I love the pacing you had with it because it can kind of blur by, as she says, blurredly in that part.

But it has all these kind of ponderous extended moments.

It's almost like a long, slow pulling back or something of the camera, or maybe it's a zooming in.

And I'm curious about the sort of ways that it doesn't just happen in landscape, but also in language.

She's talking in many ways about strangeness, but then also has these questions that are kind of unanswerable.

How do you take either the title or the questions themselves in the poem?

You instantly want to live there.

Well, as she says, think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

I mean, I love that clever idea, like the difference between imagining a place.

Because she's not even just talking about when you go to a place and you imagine living there.

She's saying, what if you don't even go there and you kind of picture it?

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