The Lyric You: Soham Patel

Soham Patel shares poems that each speak to “you,” finding in the second-person pronoun a way to explore difficult subjects. She introduces Mark Strand asking questions of his deceased father (“Elegy for My Father”), Kazim Ali addressing a past self in a time of transformation (“Gallery”), and Yanyi considering the fragmentary world alongside the beloved (“Beginning of Spring”). Patel closes with her poem “Beloved Writes a Letter,” a direct address to one of seven characters in her book The Daughter Industry.

Find the full recordings of Strand, Ali, and Yanyi reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Mark Strand (May 4, 1971)
Kazim Ali (February 24, 2011)
Yanyi (September 28, 2023)

Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.

Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.

Transcript

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0:00

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON: 0:02

This is Poetry Centered, where we invite a poet to take us by the hand for a tour through six decades of recorded poetry readings. These recordings come to you from Voca, an online archive from the University of Arizona Poetry Center that's home to more than 1,000 recordings of poets reading between 1963 and today. In each episode of this show, you'll hear three poems from that archive, chosen and introduced by a guest poet. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson. Today, our host is poet Soham Patel. My colleague Aria Pahari is here to tell you more.

ARIA PAHARI: 0:40

In Soham Patel's own words, the daughter industry is a yoga choreopoem verse play, and each of these modes coalesce into not just a book, but an embodied experience that channels formal excess as resistance against targeted disappearances. As a result, the poems are peopled. At the start of The Daughter Industry, the reader must familiarize themselves with an unborn list of players, and their would be astrological signs, queer idiosyncrasies, and South Asian names, all beginning with S. As the poem's name,"The Harrowing Phenomenon of Sex Selective Abortion", as well as the perniciousness of the gender binary. They never neglect the sanctity of play, such as when a princess declares, I weep and I will sing and dance. I will spin and sparkle with you, even when there's no need to. In this vein, we invite you to revel in these poem recordings by Yanyi, Mark Strand, and Kazim Ali, selected from the archive by Soham Patel.[MUSIC PLAYING]

SOHAM PATEL: 1:54

Hi there, this is Soham Patel. I'm recording from room 250 of the Palisades Tahoe Lodge in Olympic Valley, California. This isn't where I'm from, but where I am right now at the end of June in 2026. Today of the great honor of introducing three poems from the Voca archive. My goal was to include work by three poets who have not yet been featured on any of the almost 70 previous Poetry Centered podcast episodes. I also wanted to offer a generational range. So I'll be discussing poems by Mark Strand, a formative influence on my poetics, from a reading that took place before I was born. Kazim Ali, whose work feels as if it has been part of my thinking for my whole life, and maybe even in past lives. And finally, Yanyi, whose work I have wanted to explore more deeply, and whose poem this invitation gave me the occasion to spend time with. Thank you so much to Aria at the Poetry Center for this invitation. And to Julie, Sarah, and everyone at the University of Arizona for the support and care for this project. I'm also thrilled to share a poem from my new book, The Daughter Industry, which came out from Nightboat three months ago in April of this year. The first track is from the late poet Mark Strand, reading a section from his six-part poem titled "Elegy for My Father", recorded on May 4, 1971. The poem is dedicated to his father, Robert Strand, who lived from 1908 to 1968. The excerpt I'm talking about is titled "Answers". At the time of this reading in Tucson, strand presented answers as section four of the six-part poem. Though, in the published version, later collected in his 1973 book, The Story of Our Lives,"Answers" appears as Section 2. In this recording, the poem is still in process, and I've loved imagining what revision strategies Strand may have used to move section 4 up to section 2. Like, did he try six new starts? Did he ask a friend? Did he lay out each section on the floor, on the table, or hang it on a wall? Or did he leave it all to chance? When I first encountered Strand's work in my 20s, I was new enough to poetry that I didn't know you could speak with candor in a serious poem. I really thought it all had to be mysterious, a little opaque, and somber. When I first saw "Elegy For My Father" on paper, I remember admiring how answers made seriousness feel childlike, wondrous, and relentless. A list of a kid's recurring questions answered by a ghost. I'd never seen anything like it. Prior to hearing Strand read his own work in the Voca archives, I didn't fully apprehend the range of tonal registers his poetry sustains. My encounter with the poem on the page had obscured its lightness. But in the recording it became clear to me how thoroughly humor and strangeness animate the work. In this reading, he is full of subtle but punchy banter with the audience and wonderfully, a total goofball, much more human."Answers" is composed as a series of questions addressed to the speaker's father, who is dead or dying. And you'll hear Strand intonate them with this gentle patience as they recur. Are the questions repeated out of persistence, dissatisfaction, disbelief, or because the speaker still cannot fully fathom the responses they're given the first time? Like, when someone younger has asked a question, and the answer is because, and the child can only come back with because why? Because why? Because why? The question and answer structure accumulates echo-like. The insistent recurrence, feels at once familiar and new each time. In the context of grief, loss, the parent-child relationship, and the ghostliness of a dead father providing answers, the language also becomes at once surreal and commonplace, it's totally normal and it's super weird. The poem collapses boundaries between the living and the dead. The father returns as a ghost of voice, memory, and reply. Sometimes the responses are practical and sometimes they're abstract. The poem teaches us how pain may speak with overlapping registers like ordinary, comic, bewildered, intimate, and impossible. The questions we carry for the dead may never be answered, but poetry can give those questions a form in which they continue to live. Here's Mark Strand reading the section titled "Answers" from his poem "Elegy for my Father".[MUSIC PLAYING]

MARK STRAND: 6:51

Now, the last two poems I'll read are sections of a six-part elegy I'm writing for my father, who died some years ago. And the parts I'll read are parts 4 and 5. The fourth part is called "Answers". And I ask the questions, and the voice of my father answers them. Why did you travel? Because the house was cold, Why did you travel? Because it is what I have always done between sunset and sunrise, What did you wear? I wore a blue suit, a white shirt, yellow tie, and yellow socks, What did you wear? I wore nothing, a scarf of pain kept me warm, Who did you sleep with? I slept with a different woman each night, Who did you sleep with? I slept alone, I've always slept alone, Why did you lie to me? I always thought I told the truth. Why did you lie to me? Because the truth lies like nothing else, and I love the truth, Why are you going? Because nothing means much to me anymore Why are you going? I don't know, I've never known. How long shall I wait for you? Do not wait for me, I am tired, and I want to lie down, Are you tired, and do you want to lie down? Yes, I'm tired, and I want to lie down.[MUSIC PLAYING]

SOHAM PATEL: 9:12

Now, I bring you Kazim Ali, reading his poem, "Gallery" recorded on February 24, 2011. While Strand's selection closes his reading, "Gallery" opens Ali's. You'll hear the audience applaud Drew Krewer's introduction as Ali steps to the microphone, says, thank you. Then you'll hear the creak of the mic stand as he lowers it toward his mouth. He begins immediately without announcing the title of the poem. In a classroom, when we read poems aloud, and a student skips the title, I'm not above interrupting, obnoxiously, perhaps to say, start again, and please don't skip the title because it matters just as much as any other part of the poem. So I love this moment in the recording. Ali's entrance makes the poem feel immediate. He steps directly into its atmosphere before he even names it. He never names it. The poem opens with this gorgeous line, you came to the desert, illiterate, spirit-ridden, intending to starve. On a hunch, I asked Kazim this afternoon if he was the you in the poem. Are you the you in "Gallery". And I was right, he said, of course, that he would never want to force anyone else to starve. I chose "Gallery" because it has taught me to see emptiness as more than absence, but also as a charged and holy space, a room, a corridor, a stomach, even a passageway, a platform, or the space can be a site where art is held or could be held, and the act of looking becomes a form of yearning, a form of devotion. The title keeps opening. A gallery is also a balcony, a roofed corridor, a ship's platform, a subterranean passageway, an exhibition room, a collection, an audience like at a tennis match, or even a publisher's studio. Here, the gallery is also a desert. I read it biographically too, as a kind of metonymy for New York City, the endless landscape where Ali once lived. The poem allows these meanings to hover simultaneously. That opening line suggests that by the poem's end, you may become literate, full of spirit, and starve as intended, its movement matters to me because it proposes that lack can become a mode of receiving. That to be emptied out may also mean becoming available to art, music, and sanctity, and to the profane. The "Gallery" feels inhabited by presences not entirely visible. Ghosts of art, and a roving attention that moves through an apparently vacant space. I love the lushness of Ali's music, against the starkness of the desert, and the way the poem makes isolation physical and sensuous. Acres of ochre, the dust-blue sky. I love, to the surprise of the other, the strange young man looking at a pencil drawing of another strange young man, William Blake, his face where the poem suddenly lands a new image in the reader's mind on the actual artwork it names one of Blake's self-portraits. The ending turns back toward the title with a revelation that's full of resilience, making gallery feel less like a fixed location than a condition of perception. Art and music transform solitude into sensation. The desert, the violin's empty stomach, and the hungry notes render longing restless, embodied and unresolved. And that final imperative, oof, how it earns its command, because the poem never abandons its processional nature. Here is Kazim Ali reading "Gallery".[MUSIC PLAYING][APPLAUSE]

KAZIM ALI: 13:32

Thank you. You came to the desert, illiterate, spirit-ridden, intending to starve, The sun hand of the violin carving through space the endless landscape, A of ocher, the dust blue sky, or the strange young man beside you, peering carefully into. The man who taught William Blake painting in his dreams. You are thinking, I am ready to be touched now. Ready to be found. He is thinking how lost, how endless I feel this afternoon? When will you know? All night sounds. Violets, brief, engines. The violins empty stomach resonates. Music, a scar, unraveling in four strings. An army of hungry notes shivers down. You came to the desert intending to starve, so starve.[MUSIC PLAYING]

SOHAM PATEL: 15:13

Next up is Yanyi ending his poetry reading by offering the audience his new poem titled, "Beginning of Spring". Recorded at the Poetry Center on September 28, 2023. I chose this piece because it also offers a gentle version of death. If Mark Strand's "Elegy" lets grief speak through repetition, bewilderment, comic strangeness, and the ghostly return of a father's voice. And if Kazumi's gallery turns a vacancy into a charged room haunted by art and desire. Yanyi poem brings a loss into the domestic garden where mortality lives through love, devotion, and the unfinished work of living."Beginning of Spring" is rooted in quiet, cultivated space. Tomatoes, peonies winding paths, a cutting board with bread on it, paintings watching from the walls, and a beloved figure hunched over vines. The poem teaches me to think about endings not only as a defeat, but as a form of tenderness too, as the pressure that makes care more visible. Here, art is not only something framed or performed, it is also the daily act of tending, making, cooking, noticing, and trying to complete everything I wanted to with what time remains. Listen for the poem's quietness, for the way it measures time as both precise and vast, and for the intimate inclusivity of its address. Like the other poems have chosen, this one depends on a lyric you, and I'm drawn to the elasticity of that address. The way you can be a beloved, the self, the reader, the dead, a double consciousness, or some mysterious presence just beyond reach. In the "Beginning of Spring" that you becomes companion alongside impermanence, someone whose face can be read as a map, and whose presence anchors the speaker in a world that will remain fragmentary and ongoing. There is a ghost here too, the ghost of all that will not be completed, the future already passing through the garden, the half finished sentence waiting inside the open notebook. The poem's ending reminds me of Brenda Hillman's talks, her invocation of Rilke's instruction to live, the questions the instruction asks us to stay inside the thoughtfulness of what cannot be finished. And with this ending, sweet air gone out in one direction. Of course, I hear the boy band name, and wonder if Yanyi you too are a Harry Styles fan. Here is Yanyi reading beginning of spring.[MUSIC PLAYING]

YANYI: 18:13

So this book was really about some intense heartbreak for me, but happily in a relationship now. And since I'm so happy, I've been thinking a lot about death.[LAUGHTER] So this is a poem about death, but hopefully a nice one."Beginning of spring", working title. It's always a working title. You'll see it somewhere with a completely different name one day. When I see my death, it is with you. Hunched over vines, perfected over many Summers. We have asked these tomatoes to be ours. The early peonies and light bulbs have their heads in flames. In this garden, edged with winding paths, I follow through to the curves you have. Your face is forever a map I read back to myself. I have made for you, while I still could, everything I wanted to. Knowing that a time would come when the mouths of grass enclosing me will house beetles making purple irises. The breads cut open on the cutting board. Your paintings are watching from the walls. My notebook is open on the table to this sentence half finished, laid out with sweet air gone out in one direction. Thank you.[APPLAUSE, MUSIC PLAYING]

SOHAM PATEL: 19:56

Thanks for listening this far. Now here's a poem of my own. It is titled."Beloved Writes a Letter". And it resonates with the three poems I chose to share from the archives because it uses direct address, remains fragmentary and ongoing, references art, and it speaks to hard questions. As I said at the top of this podcast, it comes from my new book published by Nightboat in April 2026, the full title is The Daughter Industry. A ontological confession, alternative history, speculative autopoetics in three acts with seven players. This poem is told by the player called Sajani, whose name roughly translates to also meaning beloved."Beloved Writes a Letter". You are no singular existence here. The year 1982, we watch E.T in a movie theater, and even though the theater is full of people, you are the only one in the room with me. In a memory of this moment, I hear children snore over playhouse loudspeakers. We smell less the smell of butter flavor and our shiny candies, and more the lingering smell of smoking is allowed from decades ago. After several years, what seems possible is this. You alive with me. Sitting in darkness, our sticky floor pushes up against layers of rubber and canvas on our shoes, and then on my jeaned knees, and then on the palms of your hands that you will later lick for the salt taste. In the movie, there is a boy on a bicycle, the eponymous extraterrestrial character sits wrapped in a blanket in a basket mounted on handlebars. They fly on the bike in front of the moon. When I ask you what you remember, you say we were eating the same candy the boy used to lure the alien. You picked some up off the ground and put the pieces in your mouth. ET needs help from Elliot to go home, to be lifted into the sky, to disappear. You to blur into space. Amniocentesis was introduced around 1974. So now, in the science of living bodies regarding birthing, blood flow in the umbilical cord and placenta can be observed with real time sonography. And we know now a camera can sound a heartbeat, show a throb. We see shimmer against hospital white and that glassed monitor. In cystic spaces, a pattern, pulsatile, whirling, and accelerated flow, visible even to suggest a death. When I ask you if it is conceivable to graph a function of space in which intuition could take the place of the screen, you say yes. There is a frequency that keeps the body alive. You keep that metal whistle you won at the fair around your neck. I have never heard you blow into it, but sometimes the wind is enough to make a sound. Because to know you would be to know how to answer a question I do not know how to ask. What I am wishing is an open sky for you, and there is one with new planets forming a brilliant and almost blinding blue light.[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON: 24:18

You've been listening to Soham Patel and this is Poetry Centered. Soham, thank you for bringing these voices together. I love that you were with Kazim Ali while recording this, and could just ask him directly about the you poem. Sounds like a great time among poets. Listeners, thank you for being part of this Conversation By tuning in. I hope you're finding poems and poets that excite you. It's been a great run of new episodes, and we have one more coming up two weeks from today, hosted by Elizabeth Bradfield. Check out Voca in the meantime at voca.arizona.edu. We'll see you next time.

ARIA PAHARI: 24:59

Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world class library of more than 135,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me, and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audio visual archive, online at voca.arizona.edu.