TRANSCRIPT

0.2 Literary Nomads for Students

3 Oct 2025

Original Episode

0.2 Literary Nomads for Students

 

Wrecking Our Choices

One of my favorite things to talk about in literature is canon, but my guess is that you may not understand the term the same way I do. I mean, for some people in history and I guess today, the literary canon is “all the greatest works of high culture and civilization that we expect to read and study so that we may both pass our exams and be considered couth. Because being uncouth is so . . . droll.”  

Then, we got a little more savvy about what the canon represents, and there were essays written through the 80s and 90s (you know, a century ago) that the literary canon was “a bunch of dead white male Europeans” who controlled the schools and the SAT. So suddenly, teachers knew they were in trouble and began offering a wider collection of writers in efforts to be culturally diverse. Cool. I mean, I’m glad they did it and still try to, for the most part, but there was something almost token-ish about it. No, I don’t mean Tolkien (who is pretty awesome on his own, thank you very much). Token. Like, we teachers were simply trying too hard. And no matter what we chose, the choices just weren’t connecting like they could. 

Now I think there are a lot of reasons for that which we don’t need to go into here, at least right now, but my own idea of canon in part springs from this shift. For me, what is canon is something which can easily be taught. Hmm. This definition creates some problems, for sure. Taught what, exactly? The messages or morals that we approved of? Ah. And that it can be easily taught suggests it’s, I don’t know, basic? Yup. So in one sense, I think, the “high literary canon,” at least in schools, was actually some more middle-of-the-road reading with morals that fit our traditional values. Honestly? That leaves a lot out.

And so the word traveled other places. Fans (mostly nerds and geeks) argue over the Star Wars canon and the Star Trek canon or even the Undertale canon, what stories fit the “official narrative” and which do not. Canon was still the center of civilization, but the size of the civilization shrank to a particular universe or storyline. And this idea of “official” itself was questioned, as it should be. I mean, there was canon and then there was fanon, where the fans take control of some of the ideas to make them central; but then there’s ascended fanon, but then also—ah, never mind. Once we drop down that rabbit hole, there is no end to arguments about soft and hard canon, headcanon, gatekeeping and deaths of the author. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then count yourself as lucky. The interwebs and sub-Reddits can get scary. 

But even this–even this is not the canon talk I suspect a lot of us think about now. And that’s because one of my favorite film series of the past few years has added an entirely new concept to the whole canon debate, just at a time when we needed a refresh. I’m talking, of course, about {     }. Yes, “canon events.”

Now, this idea is really fun to play with, and for those who are somehow–How how how is this possible?–somehow completely divorced from the Spiderverse, canon events as they appear in the 2023 Across the Spiderverse movie are key moments in a particular universe’s history that must not be altered, so integral are they to the structure of the worlds they support. So we can bounce back and forth between worlds and timelines, maybe, but we can’t stop the death of Uncle Ben, because his death motivated every Spiderman across all the universes. Now the Spiderverse is hardly the first time-travel sort of story to do this, but it’s the most recent, currently one of the the most popular, especially with the close of the trilogy, Beyond the Spiderverse coming up and Octo-girl and Spider-women and SpiderPunk out there soon. And P.S. I know that time-travel and multiverse-travel are very different concepts, but roll with it, okay? Anyway, as I record this, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the third and final movie of the trilogy except that–key clue–Spider-ham is in it.

What the idea of “canon events” does is recognize a structural integrity to the universe, something that is “supposed to” happen, and then remove all of our personal ability to alter it. And thus: {  } a meme was born. I mean, I’ve got this hot cinnamon latte I’m drinking from my local-owned coffee shop, and I could leave it here unfinished, except that it’s, you know, {     } a canon event. So yum.

Now what does all this have to do with Literary Nomads and why is this a podcast you want to listen to? Well, because for a lot of years I’ve been a teacher kinda frustrated with this school curriculum that’s been built around our ideas of canon. And, whatever we’ve been teaching these past few decades? It hasn’t seemed to do a lot of good for our own universe as a whole. 

So Literary Nomads isn’t here to help you with your education or schooling. I’m not doing homework assignments and I’m not here to replace dumb websites like Shmoop or Sparknotes that are designed to have you do that. You know how dumb those sites are? Look how fast they’re replaced by AI now. That’s the point. That right there. We’ve turned our literature talk into completely predictable and replaceable information. 

Now, I don’t know about you and your situation. Maybe you just love literature and want more. Cool. Maybe your own experience of school isn’t doing enough for what you want it to. I get it. Maybe your school isn’t even a place where book discussion happens too much. And maybe, maybe, you’re wondering about lit already–is that really all there is? Just reading books, studying some themes, and moving on?

No, no, and no. There is much more, and there are a ton of reasons why even the best teachers of literature can’t get it to us. But I know this. The traditional school literature classroom believes it is itself a “canon event.” And what is Literary Nomads?  

A podcast that wants to test that belief.

 

Theme

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

I’m Steve Chisnell, And, today, we find where Robert Frost is in the Spiderverse.

 

Promises, BTS, and Lame Beginnings

Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and apologize right now. For this introduction to this podcast, I want to talk about Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” You’ve probably come across it already somewhere, maybe in a classroom or maybe just talked about somewhere. It’s that one where the guy takes the “road less traveled” and that stuff. And it’s probably the most over-taught, over-read, over-discussed obvious piece of poetry in the written language. 

Now I like Frost as a poet and a thinker. But this poem is absolutely part of the literary canon, a classic by an old dead white guy of European descent. 

And that’s why I chose it. And this is a good point to tell you about one of my key promises. It is to make sure that every episode of the podcast gives every listener something new to consider, some reading or idea or connection, some approach to literature that they haven’t made before. More than that, even if you’re not a fan of Frost or haven’t read the poem before, the important idea I offer you can be used in tons of other places, not just with this poem. So while we will talk about Frost today, he’s really not what this podcast is about.

It’s more about what I mentioned before that totally-amazing, not-to-be-outdone, song-of-the-century theme music: I want to push on this idea of canon, I want to challenge what it means to read well and investigate ways to do it, and I want to explore probably what we’ve missed in understanding literature that might really help us build something better, to see more clearly who we are and how different thinkers have offered us answers–or probably just really different questions from those Friday quizzes.

Unfortunately, though, there are a couple of things I can’t do. I can’t give you any quick answers to any of this, and this is a reason a lot of classes fail: they move far too quickly from story to story, poem to poem, just making sure we remember the topic rather than unpack the art. This takes time, and reflection, and some unusual practices in our thinking.

The second thing I can’t do is do all this without sometimes being really lame. By now you see that. Well, it’s not going to stop. I’ve been one of those teachers most of life and, to be honest, I suspect it’s damaged me a bit. I can get lost and distracted, and I can sometimes drop things just to keep myself entertained. But, you know, someone gave me this microphone (actually, I sold some retirement gifts and then bought it from a really cool store called Sweetwater)–but I’ve got the microphone, so you’re going to have to deal with my sense of humor. Sorry in advance. 

Finally, and importantly, I can’t tell you when I’ll deliver on my promise, when you’ll find that idea that really sticks with you, because I haven’t met you, yet, not really, so I don’t know what your experiences are. What your interests are, what drives you. What you want to get done for yourself. But I’ll say this, when it happens? I’d love to hear about it. This is a first and early invitation to write whenever you want to tell me about your reading, your thinking, and your plans. There’s a link to our podcast Mailbag in the Show Notes. No kidding. Drop a quick note and say hi. 

It’s also possible you won’t know all of my references. You may even dread anything Spiderverse, and for that, I forgive. You and I can still be friends, but, you know, you’ll come around. 

But in terms of the literature we’ll talk about? It’s all over the map. From ancient literature from Greece and Rome to BTS lyrics, and from African mythology to queer manifestos. Everything we read is fair game, and that means everything we turn our attention to for interpretation. Big field.  

So, to give you a taste of what we’ll do in this podcast, 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. 

But if you’re already familiar with Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and don’t want to think about the basics anymore, 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 Basics, Wrong and Less Wrong

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, you ego-maniacs–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, isn’t it? Yeah. Sexist much?). 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 torpedo 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 motivational kitten posters you see on classroom walls. Do me a favor: if you see one, please just write “This is not canon” on the poster and sign it Banksy.

The point is, this is what happens when we get caught up in making things teachable, we sometimes lose control. The message we want to teach becomes more important than the text itself. I’m all for having readers discover their own meanings, but this is something quite different. This was, for a long time, an entire culture which had stopped looking at what was on the page.

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. “With great power comes great responsibility.” That stuff. Canon events that mark our lives forever. Frost is writing about a canon event. {   }

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. A quick little take on the poem’s basic idea, almost suitable for Shmoop. I just need some cool clipart to drop around it and I’ll have a website. “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.

 

Ego-Maniacs

Okay, so we’ve done the school thing. Check. We’ve talked about the lessons from a poem that is so teachable that it’s all we’ve done to it for the past 100 years. Poor Bobby Frost–had he known. But this, as I said at the beginning, is what makes a work of literature canon for teachers: it is teachable. And, self-fulfilling prophecy, the more we teach the poem across the generations, the more we all know it, which means that it literally joins the Great Canon in the Sky idea, that it surely must must must therefore be one of the all-time greats. Go ahead and ask your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. Ten to one they studied it in school. So is it great literature that finds its way into the school, or is it school that makes literature great?

No matter. You and I are stuck with this poem, and I suppose we could do worse. Bobby Frost appreciates us talking about it. But I’m betting he’s a bit sad, if not surprised, that we so misread it. And yes, I mean that non-conformist stuff for sure, which is nonsense, but also I mean this sighs of regret stuff, too. We have no reason to believe that our poem’s speaker is sighing with wonder at what his life might have been. I mean, it’s a interpretation, but it’s not the interpretation for two reasons. The first is that I don’t think there is a single interpretation for any text–there are very nearly as many as there are different readers. But this doesn’t mean that we can say anything we want of it, either. More on that another time. The second reason I think we’re wrong in schools is because we miss opportunities to see the text in new ways; we scoot through it so fast (after all, it only takes up two pages in the anthology textbook we’re reading, and that includes the questions to answer–or it takes up maybe 15 minutes of class discussion); that the poem is fooling people about what it means. 

What if–what if Frost is making fun of the guy in the poem, the speaker of the poem? All his heavy melodrama and sighing and wondering: Dude, it’s a path. Pick one. 

Now, I’m sure that if we dared suggest such a thing in traditional and polite company, we would be chastised, silenced, for daring make fun of a great work. But no, really. What if it’s the great work that’s making all the fun of us?  Let’s look at it.

That last stanza, the end of the poem, really asks us to pay attention. 

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.

Well! Shall you be doing that? Rather. Yes, and when? Oh, for “ages and ages.” What an inflation! A delusion of grandeur! And you may say that well, this is how people spoke back in the 1910s. And to this I say, look, I know it seems like a long long time ago, and I’m not even that old myself, but nope-to-the-nope, I doubt you’ll find the style of language much different except for the slang they chose then. This “shall,” this “ages and ages,” this repetition of himself, “And I–(oh,) I took the one less traveled by.” 

No, look. This poem is begging us to read this part skeptically. We are absolutely right to challenge this guy and wonder what his issues are. I mean, he’s full of himself, but he becomes full of himself and makes this into a grand narrative of great profundity only afterwards. Right now, there that morning, he’s just looking down the roads and choosing a path. But later–ah, later!–he shall do all of this sighing and wondering as if it was one of the most important choices ever, “all the difference.”  He’s ego, but in retrospect, in looking back. Now watch me make it sound profound. The speaker demonstrates a “retrospective egotism.”

Well, that certainly sounds better, more literary critic style, than just telling him to get over himself, but the effect is pretty much the same. 

And how did we get to this understanding? By one key concept in literature that so many of us miss: the author of the poem is not the same as the speaker of the poem. This is really important, and we are so clumsy and careless with our reading of poetry that we forget it: the author of the poem is not the same as the speaker of the poem.

Once we recognize that the speaker of the poem can be anyone the poet wants him or her to be, we can think about the personality, even the psychology, of this character. Maybe they’re a villain! Maybe just a fool. And if they are, then they know a little bit less than the poet does, they’re a little more limited in their understanding. In Frost’s poem, his speaker/character is full of himself–excuse me, suffers from retrospective egotism. This is not an attack on the poem or an attack on Frost, it’s an interpretation of the poem and its speaker. (By the way, I have no problem if you want to attack the poem or Frost, too, but this interpretation we’re talking about isn’t one.)

Now if we’re right–if this poem is about how we (or at least this guy) sometimes build ourselves into little heroes when we tell stories about what happened to us–and I’m certain none of us would ever do that–but if it about this, notice how hugely different this interpretation, this reading of the poem is, from the traditional idea of regret for missed opportunities. That “missed opportunities and regret” reading of the poem–the one most often taught in schools–is almost the opposite of what we’re finding. It’s not about regret, it’s about this guy inventing his great regret so he can tell us about it.

 

Philosophy on The Road

Now in Literary Nomads, I said we’d travel a lot, and by that I mean that we look around for other thinkers and writers who might help us understand something better, so that we can see connections and learn more about our ideas.

William James was a philosopher of about the same time as Frost, and one of his key concepts in his philosophy of pragmatism is what he calls the “will to believe.” It’s a concept that enables us to make difficult choices, especially when we don’t have enough information to weigh the pros and cons very well. 

In this case, let’s look at our speaker again. The two roads in front of him are really about the same, and both of them just kind of lay there in front of him. He can choose either one just as easily, and if he’s going to go forward, he must choose. So how does he do it? How do we make choices like that? Look at those roads. They don’t care what he does. The only one this makes a difference to–the only one–is our speaker. And the only way for him to decide is make the choice significant–he can’t decide factually, so he has to rely on his passions, his subjective guesses, his intuition, and then go forward. He does it on faith that his choice will be correct. On these two roads, on this physical and equal choice, he dumps this personal “will to believe” in one over the other.

And this is what we do. It’s kind of like what Jean Jacques Rousseau did when he threw rocks at a tree. Rousseau writes that he was having religious doubts, and so he picked up a stone and targeted a mark on a tree. He decided that if he hit the mark, he would take it as a sign that he was destined for eternal happiness, and if he missed, he was doomed. I won’t keep you in suspense: he hit the mark just fine (maybe after a few throws, though), and he was then absurdly more comfortable with his choice. The rational mind–when perplexed, creates his own irrational significances. Even when we flip a coin, most all of us wonder if it’s, you know, just chance at work. 

And here’s our Two Roads speaker. He does the same thing, except that he says that later he will rationalize it into a big deal. When he takes the road now, it’s just an equal choice. But later, when he says he took the road, it suddenly transforms into “the one less traveled by,” that has “made all of the difference.” Well . . . . of course it did. 

And you know what? That’s–that’s kind of what we do in reading and interpretation anyway. Right? We’ve got a poem here and there are some words and we can make sense of most of them as they are, but eventually we’re asked to make an interpretation, and we’ve got a few possible ways to look at it. How do we know which interpretation to go with? What road to meaning should we travel?

And ultimately, in literature? There is no factual or objective way forward. We just, each of us, have to make a choice, use our gut response, our intuition, our “will to believe” (at least for the moment) and trust that this choice will make all that difference. That it will make the reading in some way significant, for us.

And this is why I say, this podcast isn’t particularly interested in what an ordinary textbook is going to teach about this poem or any other. And the textbook won’t even have half the things we’ll be reading, anyway. 

The point of our reading critically is to read and find significances for ourselves. To say, yes, this is how I see it–though I know other readers might take other routes–but this is how I see it, and this is how it becomes important for me. 

 

Other Routes

Now what we’ve done here so far is 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 general readers and one for teachers, 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 reader and teacher episodes, even if you aren’t a teacher. Go ahead. Steal some secrets. Break a few rules. That’s what we do here. Consider your listening a canon event. { }

But let me offer you another way to look at it, which I promise isn’t in any textbook reading of Frost. I like talking about the structure of literature, perhaps too much, but that’s one of my things, so . . . let’s take a look at the otherwise pretty boring way this poem is put together. 

The poem begins with “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” It’s line one. Pretty straightforward. And then our speaker says that sometime in the future he will say “Two roads diverged in a wood.” But. . . . but . . . he is saying that! Right now while we’re reading it. The poem is kind of a circle, a ring, a loop–and yes, kind of like our essays that start and end with thesis sentences, maybe, but here it’s in a narrative–and so this poetic voice, this speaker, is essentially time traveling back to the exact moment of his decision. Or, if you prefer, he is telling us about his time traveling forward to our reading it now. And here he is now, telling us, just as he said he would. 

I used to think that there was a simple past tense verb poem where he is telling us about what happened to him in the morning as he faces the roads. And then he wonders about in the future how he will tell the tale. But now, now, I wonder if he isn’t in this sort of loop where these roads diverge in a yellow wood, telling it over and over, letting us know that he will tell it again in the future–which of course he will when we pick it up to read it again. It’s a friggin’ canon event, but one he is caught in forever. 

Cute but stupid, I hear you say. Oh yeah? Well check out this little line that almost no one ever talks about ever. 

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

That’s right. Since he is only one person, one traveler, he can’t escape the loop. He’s doomed to always take that one road and wonder about the other. You know what he needs? A good multiverse story to work it all out.

Well, I get it. Frost and Spiderpig Across the Multiverse, one of those things that I bet has never been spoken in all of humanity’s experience. But I couldn’t not say it, because, you know { }. 

But let’s go back to our significance idea, the will to believe. I might ask of this time-travel idea, “Interesting, so what does it do for us?” I mean, yeah, it’s kinda fun to think about for a minute, but does it help us understand anything that is significant for us? 

Now, I know that not all writing has to be significant, like world-shaping importance. And I know that all reading doesn’t have to be for deep ideas. Some of it is just to turn our brains off for awhile; you know, like Throne of Glass. (Hey hey hey, don’t throw rocks, I’m just sayin’. No one is reading Sarah Maas looking for life-changing philosophy.)

But here, while we’re spending some solid time with this poem, and we think it probably deserves at least a second look, don’t we hope to discover something important from it? Sure. And if we don’t? Well, that’s okay. 

Remember how this “will to believe” thing works and how Frost’s speaker plans to gratify his own ego later with his story about those roads: we’re in charge of making the meaning from what we find. And if all we discover is more confusion or a time-travel interpretation, well, okay then!

 

Critical Shifts

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. 

Unlike a single class lesson, 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 canon. 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. 

If you’re a student of any kind listening, I’ll have you thinking about literature a bit differently from school, but also a bit differently for yourself. And as we work together in our thinking, we’ll talk about strategies for reading and meaning-making, for talking with others about what we think, and about writing powerfully, too. Most importantly, we’ll look at that key element, what makes our reading significant for us; and for most of us, this means what we’ll do with it. For me, this is a critical moment for our critical literacy: that shift to doing.

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. You, um, know you want to. Why fight it? Your clicking on that link is a { } canon event .

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 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

Benzon, Bill. “Robert Frost, Time Traveler: The Road Not Taken.” 3 Quarks Daily, 21 Sep. 2015, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/09/robert-frost-time-traveler-the-road-not-taken.html.

Finger, Larry L. “Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: A 1925 Letter Come to Light.” American Literature, vol. 50, no. 3, 1978, pp. 478–79. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2925142. 

Kelley, James B. “When Teachers Talk to Students About the Poetry of Robert Frost.” The Robert Frost Review, no. 21, 2011, pp. 24–40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43897696. 

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. 

Zubizarreta, John. “Teaching Robert Frost.” The Robert Frost Review, no. 10, 2000, pp. 69–74. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24727291. 

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
BLOG
Essai on Culture and Language
FICTION et cetera
Long and Short Forms
WAYWORDS INN
Connections and Events

Your reading of it?

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This