Pre-Roll

 

Hey, everyone.

 

I mentioned last week that we were taking a short pause on our journey with Le Guin so that I could drop a short series of three introductory episodes for Literary Nomads, one for readers, one for students, and one for teachers. 

This is one of those episodes and it focuses on the infamously over-discussed poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Now, if you are really into this poem or just want to find out what I have to say about it, just know that I’m not talking about it in terms of anything we’ve discussed for the past couple of months. I suspect you’ll find it interesting, even though I also cover some of the nuts and bolts of the podcast.

And, if you’re new to my podcast or fairly new and wonder really what you’ve gotten yourself into, this might be the perfect peak into what my approach and goals are for all of us. 

Once I complete the three episodes, we’ll jump right back into our journey with Le Guin and start exploring some other terrific reads!  Enjoy!

 

0.1 Literary Nomads for Readers

 

On Pipes and Mirrors

 

You know if you’re anything like me, you spend far too much time with Rene Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images deeply rooted in your thinking. You know the one I’m talking about. It was painted about 100 years ago. The painting’s a pretty plain beige background and across the middle of it is a pipe, like for smoking tobacco. Underneath the pipe, on the beige canvas, is written the words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” which is, of course, French, because Magritte is a painter who spoke French, but ah-ah-ahh! that’s not because he was from France. Magritte was from Belgium–see what happens when we assume?–and you’d think that he might have written the message in, like, Dutch, but that would assume he was from the north of Belgium, and if he was from the east of Belgium it might have been German, but no, he was from the south end of Belgium which largely speaks French. Not that it matters much. He could have spoken any number of languages, and probably did, and just chosen to write the words in French, because they’re not very difficult: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” or in the barbarian language that I speak fairly monolingually, “This is not a pipe.”

So yeah. If you’re like me, you think too much about this painting that has a pipe which literally says “This is not a pipe.” But maybe–and fortunately for you probably not–you’re not like me, and you give this painting little if any thought once you’ve seen it. 

It’s a silly thing, really, this oxymoronic painting, this self-contradiction, this thing which turns against itself. We’re supposed to, what, look at it and say “Oooooh, that’s so deep! He’s trying to mess with my head!” Is this all the modern art can do? Pretend to be this self-absorbed nonsense philosophy that says, what, that everything means nothing at all or something? Well, that might have paid Magritte’s grocery bills but not mine. And then we go about our business of paying the grocery bills, our daily lives of reality and drudgery.

…This is not a pipe. . . 

I mean, of course it’s a pipe! It sure as hell isn’t a walrus or the second season of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air being run in syndication. 

And, geez, we’ve been talking for about two minutes now–what is this podcast about? I thought I was getting some kind of podcast about books and literature and authors and stuff here. 

[Clears throat.] Why, um, yes. Yes, you are. Mostly kinda. Literary Nomads is a podcast about reading literature–that is, ways to read and make meaning with it. And yes, we talk about poems and stories, novels and plays, and I can tell you we’ll explore many of these more thoroughly than will make some of us comfortable. But it’s not really so much about these works as it is in the reading of them. It’s not so much about the painting as the pipe. Or rather, still, our response to the pipe. What we do with the pipe, and the painting, and the poem.

I want to give you with this episode a quick introduction to what Literary Nomads is and what it does, and even a little about why it does. And I want to show you how to make the best use of it. Think of this as an introduction but also a demonstration, a “How To” manual for you, those who like me love literature and want to share those fascinations.

But the first thing we need to say about it is perhaps what it is not. This is not a podcast that jumps from book review to book review week to week and not one which interviews writers to learn where they get their crazy ideas. And it sure as hell isn’t a podcast where we listen to a Wikipedia summary of a book. 

But if you felt even just a little inconvenienced by my talk about The Treachery of Images, about Magritte’s pipe, if you wanted me to get to the point right away, two key takeaways: (I hear the word “takeaways” is really cool to use in the business world). Two takeaways: 1) This is not a podcast of quick insights and takeaways because (newsflash) neither literature nor reading (or thinking for that matter) work that way; and 2) ironic twist and surprise revelation: I was and almost always am always talking about precisely our topic today.

This is not a pipe. But the more we look at the painting and protest that “It is, it is, it is a pipe!”, the more we cement our own self-deception. That our first reading of Magritte’s painting, this thing which lives deep in my brain, isn’t wrong, necessarily, but it’s only 14% right. It’s that “instant read” and dismissal that is our enemy here. 

I hope you come to this podcast looking for ways to discover more about the literature that we read than perhaps we can always find on our own, looking for ways to read and think about the world than perhaps there are paintings and manuals for, that sometimes the ideas that art and literature produce might resonate a little more deeply than we believe, a little more honestly than we want to believe. 

The painting’s title, of course, gives away its primary conceitIn literature, allowing a metaphor or unexpected comparison ... More: The Treachery of Images. Of course what we see is not a pipe. It’s just the image of a pipe. And as we all know, there is a pretty big difference between representation and reality. Just ask anyone who buys something with a ten dollar bill and claims that it represents an amount of gold in the US treasury. Yes, self-deception is a modern pastime, but even this–even this–which doubtless many of you who know this painting already understand–even this is not exactly what we’re about today. 

Because you and I may be looking at the painting, the representation, but we’re also, of course, reading the painting’s French claim that the representation is not a pipe. This declarative sentence is represented in juxtaposition to that pipe image equally on the beige canvas. But if the words, too, are representations, where does this leave us? 

And if I could scrawl one more sentence onto that canvas–which is why I cannot visit the LA County Museum of Art where it is displayed, somehow existing as a Belgian immigrant messing with my head–if I could scrawl a sentence onto that canvas, it might be: 

“Cette pipe est un miroir.”

“This pipe is a mirror.” 

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, And, as ever, how we choose our roads is the point of the story.

 

A Lame Beginning

Can we talk about–wow, I’m going to say it–can we talk about Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”?  No no no no!  Don’t leave! Not yet. I got you. I understand. It’s the most over-taught, over-read, over-discussed obvious piece of poetry in the written language. And truly, I admire Frost a great deal as a thinker and poet, and this is a fine enough poem, truly. A classic. Yeah. But, yahhhh, could I really have chosen anything more . . . obvious? cliched? for an introduction to this podcast for you?  

Well, no, actually, I don’t think I could have chosen anything quite more cliched to discuss. And that’s why I did it. And it’s really important that I tell you right now, my promise is to make sure that every episode of the podcast gives every listener something new to consider, some reading or idea or connection, that they haven’t made before. 

So if you are a fan of literature–and I am absolutely supposing that you are, or else you would not have tried an episode of this podcast and you would not have listened even this far and you would not now be dreading yet another discussion about this poem that many of us haven’t seen since, what, ninth grade?—If you are a fan of literature in even one of these ways, then I surely have chosen the most lame of opening literary works on which to bank my promise.

I promise that before we end this podcast, I’ll have left you with at least one idea or connection about this poem that you have not previously considered, and it won’t be lame. It’ll be worth the thought. 

But some caveats. First, this isn’t a fortune cookie. I can’t just crack this moment open and tell you what that idea is. Literature doesn’t deliver that way, all wrapped in plastic and thrown into the Chinese takeout tray as an expectation but paradoxically a stray disposable amusement.

Some of the best ideas from art and literature settle in and flower over time; others sneak up and suckerpunch us. But they rarely come quick.

And the second caveat. I’m promising that the important idea I give you won’t be lame. I do not promise that I won’t be lame along the way. Because, bt dubbs–um, by the way, stop trying to sound like the early 2000s, Steve, you’re far older than that—because I too can get lost in the exploring and connections we will make, and because I want to entertain myself (if not you) along the way. We’re exploring, but it’s pretty obvious I’ve got the mic right now, so we can only explore in the directions I wanna go, unless you write me and tell me to turn thataway over there.

Finally, and realistically, I can’t tell you when I’ll deliver on my promise, because you are there listening and I haven’t met you, yet, not really, so I don’t know what your experiences are. It’s fully possible that you never met the Magritte painting, so I’ve already fulfilled it. It’s possible you are a teacher of the Robert Frost poem and done your Ph.D. work on it. Ooh, boy, I could be in trouble, but even then I stick to my promise.

And it’s possible that you sorta kinda remember the poem and what it means but haven’t really gone much further than that. “What it means.” That’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? It’s kind of like that “fortune cookie” thing, that we imagine a poem or short story has “a meaning,” maybe one intended by the author, that we can find out, and then pack up and move on to tomorrow’s doomscrolled discovery. 

Yeah, no. Not so much. I call the podcast Literary Nomads because first, I am interested in the question of the literary, the work of literature and other human creations as they push up against our ideas of art, of thinking. Now that doesn’t mean I’m only looking at “high literature.” I’m as likely to spend time with the BTS song “Butter” or the 1970s TV show Kolchak the Night Stalker as I am a play by Sophocles or Ibsen. It’s not the text that’s important to this podcast so much as the ideas which are made with the text. And the other term in the title is Nomads. I want to take these ideas and explore with them, wander, see where they lead, from one community and space to the next. So we’re not going to settle down in one way of thinking, one philosophy or approach, or one perspective for meaning. In that sense, I suspect we’re going places fairly unique.

But that’s enough of a taste of what we’re up to for now except to say who I am. Heck, if I’m going to lead you places on this free podcast tour (which is also ad-free), you at least have the right to know who the guide is. And that’s me, Steve Chisnell, who for the longest part of his life so far has been an educator in lots of different classrooms, middle school to college, private and public, in the US and elsewhere. I’ve taught language, philosophy, literature, music, drama, speech, debate, and epistemologyAny question of philosophy which addresses what we can know ... More (how we know what we know). Now, I write myself, and I promote critical literacy and democratic advocacy through Waywords Studio; I campaign for more and better reading, for the right to read for everyone and of most everything, and for meeting head-on the results of that reading, to support everyone in building just and thoughtful communities. Aww. Sounds pretty cool when I put it all together like that. But really, I do my best every day to put stuff together for others so they can do their stuff. If I was going to get provocative, I’d say I help produce frictional readers, but that’s too much to take on in this short episode.

So, you’ve been with me so far. Let’s get into this poem a little bit and see what we can learn from it. Yes, I’m going to start out with the basics because I have to work with the assumption that some of you might want a quick refresher on this poem or even to hear and think about it for the first time. After that, though, we’ll see where it takes us. 

So if you’re ready to get into the “good stuff” with Frost, here is a good place to tell you that the podcast is broken into chapters, and if your podcast player does chapters, you might skip over the next two, the first being a reading of the poem and the second reviewing the quick interpretations that almost every school has ever done with it. But if you want that refresher, let’s start with the reading.

Reading: Frost: “The Road Not Taken”

Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken” (1915)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

 

The School Interpretation

 

Still not a bad little poem. It’s got a nice subtle rhyme scheme, a little ABAAB, though if you were listening you probably didn’t hear too much of that because the oral performance subdues it a bit unless you read it like a Dr. Seuss story:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Yeah no. But if you are an American listener–that is, one from the United States, because there are a couple of dozen countries that are part of the Americas–if you’re a US listener and you know this poem already, you know its great symbolic message: Ah, the individual who can go his own path and not conform, to take the road that others have not, the road that others don’t, the road less traveled!  

When I was in school I saw this poster up on many classroom walls, a fork in the road and the wisdom that we must all take our own paths, go our own way, be our own trailblazers, avoid doing what others do, and similar messages. Do what the great American poet Robert Frost advises: Take the Road Less Traveled. 

It is kind of perfect Americana when put that way, because this country has always prided itself on that individual spirit, that triumph of the unique person who can stand above the crowds and make himself into whatever he wants (it’s almost always a “he” in that context). Manifest Destiny. Beacon to the World, Land of Opportunity, Home of the Brave. A place where anyone can become anything if only he work hard and rise above the rest, not follow the crowd. The American Dream. Follow that road less traveled, that road not taken. 

And just as quickly, let’s pull the rug out from under all of this nonsense, because none of that is what the poem is at all, of course. Anyone who listened just now or reads it again slowly will see. This particular poem is now quite famous for being the most misread poem in American history, and I won’t dispute it. 

The middle of the poem makes the problem clear:

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

 

The speaker at first thinks one trail is less traveled, but clearly clearly they are worn “about the same” and “equally lay,” especially that particular morning. So no more of this non-conformity stuff, no matter what posters you see on the classroom walls. Do me a favor: if you see one, please just write “This is not a pipe” on the poster and then throw it into the trash along with the one with the kitten hanging from its paws that says “Just hang in there.”

And I don’t want to spend a lot of time with this today, but I want to put a pin in this idea: we have popularly (and even professionally for some teachers) misread this poem. The representation is not the reality. And why? Because, I think, somehow, our mythological desire for this America individualism and confident non-conformity message is so big, so consuming, that it swallows up smaller messages in its path, makes them only what we want them to say, not what they are. Bigger idea, there, so we’ll have to pick it up later.

Instead, and better classrooms will teach this, that when we read the poem, it must more be about that stuff at the end, what our speaker will think of his choice in the future. He says:

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Our speaker wonders about choice and consequence. Once we decide to go one direction, we may never know what our lives might have been had we chosen differently. Now I am recording this episode in the middle of the 2020s, and it seems two of every three TV shows and films out there are about time travel and multiverses and stuff, so this 1915 epiphany may not seem like such a big deal to us. Our choices have consequences. Our choices may even have regrets attached to them. 

The speaker offers just a couple of images that intimate his feelings about it. The first is the “sigh” when he will tell the story later, but is that a sigh of regret? Or is it a sigh of understanding? Or even a sigh of happiness? We don’t know. The second place is the last line: “And that has made all the difference.” Well, um, sure. Life is different from the way it might be had you chosen the other path. But he specifically doesn’t say better or worse here. Just “different.” I bring these up because I notice, as I’m sure you do, that it’s hard to compare a path taken from one not, since we don’t know if the untraveled path would have been better or worse. 

It may be at this point that our teachers claim this is about “regret” at least for not knowing, for wondering what life might have been had he chosen differently. Had any of us when we encounter choices. There are always regrets and wonder later. I was once offered a job to teach in a castle on the Basra river in Istanbul, and I turned it down. Long story. But do I wonder? You betcha. 

So there it is. Packaged in a nice little piece of plastic wrap and ready for the sweet and sour chicken or the Friday quiz. “The Road Not Taken” is about choices and the impact they have on our lives, the regrets that we will surely have, and the ambiguity of feelings that go with these. It may even be, if we wish, how we mythologize those choices, make them bigger than they might otherwise have been. After all, the guy was just out walking one morning and came on two paths, and suddenly he’s picturing himself in the future heaving and sighing over it. Yeah, maybe my Turkish school job would have been cool and altered my life, but how do I know that another choice–say, how I grabbed a blackberry jam for my toast this morning instead of the strawberry–didn’t alter my life, too?

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two jams arrived for my cafe toast and I—

I took the fruit less eaten on rye,

And that has made all the difference.

 

A Bit Further Than School

Okay, so first I want to welcome back the folks who skipped the last two chapters of the podcast to get to “the good stuff.” How’ve you spent these past few minutes? Oh–nevermind, you just hit the “Skip” button. So you time-traveled forward. Yeah.

So, okay, we have the misreading of the poem–that’s the non-conformity bit–and we have the traditional reading of the poem of choices and potential regrets with different life paths which we exaggerate or mythologize. And frankly, this is where more than 90% of readings end, in school or in online sources. And they are…just so…so quick and basic and I don’t know, simple that it’s no wonder we’ve come to love and hate this poem. We get it. Quit talking about it, already!

But I think this is because we read quickly, want those handy takeaways which feed our thirst for getting answers and moving on, especially if those answers feed our egos. “I’m a non-conformist!”  Yeah, dude, your interpretation conforms to those who haven’t read the poem.  

But maybe you’ve been screaming at me along the way, too, reading a little more closely still than I’ve spent time doing. You’re saying, “He does say road less-traveled!” “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference.” So the roads are different! And my response is actually, with respect, to disagree. He says he will “be telling” the story of the choice that way. That first, that morning, in reality, in the present, he is encountering the two roads and he finds them “equally lay”ing there. But then he says to himself in the final stanza, Ah, “I shall be telling this with a sigh” and all the rest of it. 

What’s interesting to me about this moment, this contradiction, is that we now have an entirely new topic to talk about, and it’s one of my favorites. I’ve been saying all along that the person in this poem is “the speaker,” not Bobby Frost, because this is what we do in literature talk. We identify fiction tellers as “narrators” and poet tellers as “speakers.” Why? No important reason for right now–mostly just convention, because they’re really the same for us in what they do.

Here, the speaker of the poem is someone different from Robert Frost. It’s a character, like in a story, who is telling what happened, and Robert Frost is having us meet this character. And this character, this speaker, is contradicting himself, and that contradiction happens in the last stanza of the poem–usually a place of importance, since it’s the last thing we’ll read, kind of like the climax of the story–and he says that he ran into these two roads thing, not a big deal really but he paused to think about it for a while, and then he decided he would tell this story later like it was a momentous deal, like it was all about non-conformity or something. 

And you know what? I don’t think this poem is about the roads at all, anymore. It’s about this kind of thing we do to our own pasts, this revision or rewriting, we rationalize what we did to make it sound more cool. It was really kind of an arbitrary choice no matter what happened–they were basically the same road. But our speaker is going to do a bit of “poetic fiction” shall we say, to rationalize his life into these dramatic triumphs or to philosophize with us. Maybe one day he will come to believe the stories he tells about that road, because you know what? Ceci n’est pas une pipe. How the speaker is representing what happened and what really happened are two different things. And here’s Frost, up above the speaker, writing the whole thing out for us, and saying, “Look at this guy!” There’s an ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More here, because our speaker is certainly ready to deceive others but may well in time deceive himself, forget the reality altogether, replaced as it is with this future telling and re-telling. 

It’s almost like–like when we tell Americans over and over again that this poem is about non-conformity and the American Dream and Go Individualism! when the reality of the poem is something else. The representation takes over.

When I had that choice to teach in the school in Turkey. (Oh, did you miss that? That’s what happens when you skip chapters! Jeesh. Who gave you that dumb advice?) When I had that choice to teach in the school in Turkey, I was contacted by the US ambassador in Istanbul who warned me about terrorists in the early 1990s who were targeting Americans. And he said to me, I won’t forget it, “I want you and all teachers to be safe. And I know your reputation and the great work you will do in the future for your students and for Waywords Studio, which will put on this awesome podcast called Literary Nomads and tell people about the poem by Robert Frost which no one understands, not even me, which will ironically be about this very conversation we’re having now.” Yup. That’s the story I’m telling today. (Sigh)

Kind of a dramatic sigh, there, and really, who’s to say that we shouldn’t read the whole last stanza this way, with mock drama?

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Even the repetition of that “I” is a bit of stage drama, isn’t it? What I think is funny about this is that, if it’s a fair reading–and I admit it’s a bit jaded–then really all these interpretations about difficult choices and regrets and looking back and the weight of moments of decisions are . . . kinda bull. He’s mocking this lesson, which makes this whole poem the opposite of what is often taught, a big ironic joke played on those who read it straight.

A few of you listeners may have heard about this before, and if so you know that old Bobby Frost said a few things that make us suspicious it’s true. He said once, “I’ll bet not half a dozen people can tell who was hit and where he was hit by my ‘Road Not Taken.’” And one of Frost’s biographers, said that Frost often took walks with a friend, poet Edward Thomas, who quote “was a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other.” If this is the case, then this whole poem is more like a personal joke on Thomas, not anything we’ve really talked about earlier. As the biographical account goes, Frost sent Thomas the poem and Thomas loved it, missing the joke. Frost was disappointed that it was misread, and so told Thomas it was all a “mock sigh,” etc. etc. Interestingly, too, Thomas returned a letter and said that he saw what Frost was up to, but he also, according to the biography, warned Frost that quote “most readers would not understand the poem’s playfulness.” 

Oops. 

So what we now have is what? A joke poem written to a friend which was misread, and then adopted to the broader American culture and classroom to be taught in sincerity (again, a misreading), which was then again misread completely as a poem of non-conformity. After all of this, isn’t it about time we just kind of took the whole thing out into the backyard and gave it a quick burial? 

And I say, of course not! Because these ironies, these ambiguities, these readings and misreadings, these building up and out and backwards of meanings, themselves raise questions for all of us as readers. Look. Bobby Frost and I will likely disagree on a great deal, especially on the meaning of his poems. But if anything, what this entire story may tell us is that there is a gulf, a gap, a difference, maybe a critical one, between what an author intends his work to mean and what we actually discover on the page. And what this implies, if we accept it as a brief statement right now, is this leaves reading and meaning-making of art and literature in the hands of us, the readers. And so, Literary Nomads. 

But we’re not done. In this light, I’ve got still more for us to consider.

 

Reading the Road

Now, in my mind as you and I walk through all of this, is not a complete investigation into Frost’s poem, not by a long shot. And you should know that I have two other introductory podcasts for Literary Nomads, one for teachers and one for students, to help them find their way through what I’m offering here. I’m still using Frost’s poem, but outside of a few repeated concepts that introduce the podcast and my approach to it, the interpretations for the poem are quite different still. So if you’re enjoying our travel so far and want more, I formally give you permission to listen to the teacher and student episodes, even if you are neither a teacher or students. Go ahead. Break a few rules. That’s what we do here.

But I promised you more on the readers and meaning-making. So let me drop a big word on you, if I can: phenomenology. Much to say about this term, but it is basically about how we–you know, human readers–build meaning from our experiences. It’s not the reality of the pipe that’s important at all, but how we choose to represent the pipe, how and why we build meanings. The pipe is a mirror.  If you’re into science-y stuff and objective facts and all, what I’m talking about may terrify you, and all I can say right now is that we get more into all of this during through the podcast episodes, but try this: It’s a fact that humans perceive and experience and think about experiences differently from each other. How and why they do it is worthy of investigation. Set up a lab, if you’d like. 

For readers today, though, since I’ve left us all unhappy with the ending of the poem and its joke and misreadings, let’s turn back to the roads themselves. They lay before us, both fairly equally trod, and the speaker says,

… long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Since the roads are the same, what exactly is our speaker thinking about? Is he examining the blades of grass for difference? Doesn’t seem like it. If two choices are before us, and they are absolutely weighed the same, we don’t really know what to do and we can get paralyzed. The question that must be in our minds, in the speaker’s mind, is “How do I choose?” It’s not the physicality of the roads that is at issue: it’s our act of choice. 

And I might say here, what a marvelous opportunity! We get so caught up in our pro/con lists over hard choices–what college or job to choose, whether we can confide in our neighbor or not, which Baskin Robbins ice cream flavor to have–we spend so much time in analysis of the different advantages and disadvantages of choices, that we miss the chance to experience the true act of choosing itself. The roads are the same; there is no analysis that will reveal anything. All there is . . . is choice itself. 

If I could be so bold, happening as it is in the speaker’s present, this is a moment of real presence, of mindfulness, of a life-altering event that is entirely in our own control. No one is demanding action, no one shoving us in one direction or another. He can take the time, “long I stood,” and consider himself and his life and even differences ahead. 

So now that we are focused on him, our speaker, our reader of the roads ahead, the choice he has, notice that at this moment it doesn’t really matter which he takes. No matter what road he takes, he can meet it like he does this one, as present, as a living being making choices to choose its meaning. 

What an enormous difference this is when we think about choosing! Sure, pro/con lists and all are good strategies, but what they offer us are examinations of what happens to us from outside influences: “I could lose my job in a risky market, the college mentors might be weak, the neighbor may not be trustworthy, the blueberry marshmallow flavor may be too sweet and not fruity enough.” All of these problems erase ourselves from the equation. What will we do when we meet the results of our choices? What meanings will we make when we meet them? 

Once we recognize that we are the most powerful factor in the choices we make, we understand that this–this choice moment–”that has made all of the difference.” It’s not that the speaker chose a particular road, but that he chose. “And I–I took the one less traveled by,” that “I” again emphasized, but in a very different reading. And we must therefore also reimagine that sigh, not of regret, not of melodrama, but of recognition and even of wonder. 

In his Notebooks, Frost once wrote: “There is nothing more non-existent and so silly than to think and talk about than what might have been.” Here he dismisses the idea of regret and remorse, much as he might have with his friend Edward Thomas who did exactly that. This reading of “present choices” helps us understand the vitality of our awareness of self and what life brings to it.

 

How To Read with Literary Nomads

So by now you may be asking, “Yes, but then, which interpretation is right?” And I respond with “Yes, and . . . “ Reading is not about finding the answer and moving on, not about giving the poem 4 out of 5 stars and gasping at the BookTok camera. Those treat reading like it’s some kind of dessert treat, something to buy, consume, and then move on. On this podcast, reading is about us engaging the moment with the books we meet, working with them and discovering for ourselves what they mean for us. And that can be highly personal, but it can also mean meanings found through communities who share their understandings and how they found them. 

But this also takes time, time to understand how and from where or why these meanings arise. What produced them. And how do they connect powerfully with the next reading, and the next one down that road. 

Literary Nomads is not simply stand-alone episodes, but episodes which link everything together on a longer journey. We’ll spend less than an hour each week exploring titles and ideas, but then we’ll carry those ideas with us to the next stop. I don’t do podcast seasons, but I have “Journeys,” or paths we walk together for some time before changing focus. For instance, Journey 5, about Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress,” was almost 20 episodes by the time we discovered about a dozen or so texts related to the poem. Even so, most episodes will review what we’ve already discussed, so you can drop in at just about any place and feel caught up pretty soon. 

And finally, our journeys will travel pretty far, not just in interpretation, but in philosophy, the acts of writing and bringing our voices into community, into finding the significances for our choices. We’ll look at literature across genre and time, from writers across the world–I will definitely be choosing titles that will make you challenge their value for discussion or that are far outside each of our zones of comfort for reading. And I do it not only because there are artists out there in all kinds of spaces we too often avoid meeting, but because I want to challenge our prejudices about “fine literature” and literary canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More. Reading is reading, it’s something we do, not something that happens to us. 

As readers, my hope with Literary Nomads is to thicken our thinking and show how we can expand it into spaces we hadn’t before. And the only cost for listening is to sometimes bear with my weird sense of humor. 

So there you have it, a taste of what I’m up to with this podcast, and two other intro episodes lurking nearby if you still want to hear more about this Frost poem and what it does. If not, dive in, just about anywhere. The old episodes are only old by date–everything is evergreen with a literary podcast, so if you see an author or title in the archives you want to hear about, I encourage you to go give it a listen.

If I’ve caught you already and you’re ready to try the podcast, awesome. And if you’re really curious, head on over to the Waywords Studio website for other programs and content I offer along with a newsletter that covers my projects, thinking, and approaches to reading. You’ll find a link in the Show Notes. 

Thanks for checking it out, for listening this far. And until we connect again, do yourself a favor:

Go read something.

 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonuses, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by—

 

Y Puns

—Hold it hold it hold it. I don’t usually do this, but I just remembered another cool way to think about this poem. We’ve spent some time talking about that huge philosophical dilemma Frost’s speaker meets and what he thinks about it, what the question of choice is for him. Cool.

Now, let’s do a quick visualization. Bear with me. We’ll call this a graphological look at the poem, to give it a fancy sounding name. Imagine the scene of him standing at the point of choices, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” right? He’s standing there. Now, let’s pivot the camera’s point of view, kind of like in a video game or movie special effect. Turn the camera so that it rises up into the air and points downward at our speaker; we’re over him now, looking down on the scene of the roads diverging, the forking road. What does it look like?

Kinda like the letter “Y,” yeah? He’s standing at the bottom of a great big letter Y made by the two forking roads. And this whole poem is kind of about that question, you know, like “Why do we choose one path over another?” “Why is this important to us?”

And here’s our clever Bobby Frost, turning his entire poem into a visual pun, making the entire philosophical moment into a tiny joke. 

Yeah, you’re not buying it, I get that. But you know what? It’s far less likely now that you will ever read this poem again without thinking of this dumb little “Y” image. See ya!

 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonuses, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography

Finger, Larry. “Frost’s Reading of ‘The Road Not Taken.’” The Robert Frost Review, no. 7, 1997, pp. 73–76. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24727344. 

Fleissner, R. F. “Whose ‘Road Less Traveled By’? Frost’s Intent Once Again.” The Robert Frost Review, no. 9, 1999, pp. 22–26. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43897183. Accessed 26 Sept. 2025.

Ketterer, David. “The Letter ‘Y’ in ‘The Road Not Taken.’” The Robert Frost Review, no. 7, 1997, pp. 77–78. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24727345. Accessed 26 Sept. 2025.

Kjeldsen, Neil. “Taking ‘the Other.’” The Robert Frost Review, no. 28, 2018, pp. 123–33. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26731492. Accessed 26 Sept. 2025.

Savoie, John. “A Poet’s Quarrel: Jamesian Pragmatism and Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken.’” The New England Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 1, 2004, pp. 5–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1559684. 

Simon, Jonathan D. “Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: A Dead Serious Joke.” WhoWhatWhy, 28 Oct. 2023, https://whowhatwhy.org/culture/art/robert-frosts-the-road-not-taken-a-dead-serious-joke