S1E5 - Migratory Habits of the Soul
Season 1, Episode 5
Chi and Chad close read Robert Hayden’s “A Plague of Starlings,” a tiny poem about a walk across campus that opens out onto the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Plato’s Phaedo, Aesop’s Fables, and the afterlife.
Sources and references:
Mary Oliver, “Starlings in Winter”
Hayden’s parting speech for the Library of Congress
Aesop’s “The Farmer, His Boy, and the Rooks”
Robert Hayden reading “Zeus over Redeye”
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
Peter Campion, Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry
Audre Lorde, “The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches”
Amber Flora Thomas, “Confessions of a Pseudo-Nature Writer,” p. 779
Further reading: