Robert Polito

Robert Polito (born 1951) is an American academic, critic and poet. He has been Director of the Writing Program at The New School since 1992. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award and an Edgar Award for "Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson". [ [http://www.writing.newschool.edu/polito.htm|Robert Polito biography] , New School University website.]

Personal

Polito is from Boston, Massachusetts, and lives in New York City. He received a Ph.D. in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard University.

Recent work

Polito is working on a collection of poems, "Hollywood and God" (tentative title), and on "Detours: Seven Noir Lives", a nonfiction book. He is editing an anthology of Manny Farber’s film and art criticism. [ [http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/747|Robert Polito profile] , PEN American Center website.]

elected work

"Doubles" (a book of poems); "A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover"; and "At the Titan's Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron's Poetry". Editor of the Library of America volumes "Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s" and "Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s". Essays and poems in "Best American Poetry", "Walk on the Wild Side: American Urban Poetry Since 1975", "O.K. You Mugs", and "Communion"; also in "The New Yorker", "The Yale Review", "ArtForum", "BOMB", "Verse", "Pequod", "Open City", "Ploughshares", "New York Times Book Review", and "VLS", among other magazines. Fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundations. Contributing editor of "BOMB" and "The Boston Review". Has taught at Harvard, Wellesley, and New York University.

Quotes

*"Ed Hood knew everyone. Through him I encountered most of the Cambridge Warhol crowd that would [be] people [heard about in] "Edie" (Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s oral history of Edie Sedgwick) along with that crowd’s assorted New York visitors: Ed Hennessy, Chuck Wein, John Hallowell, Gerard Malanga, Lou Reed, René Ricard, Donald Lyons, Patrick Fleming, Dorothy Dean, Jonathan Richman, and Andy Paley." [ [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=177974 "A Pair of Andys: Looking at Andy Warhol through Andrew Marvell's eyes, and vice versa"] , PoetryFoundation.org.]
*Among my Boston College friends, Warhol radiated a sly, sinister hipness, a tangent to the dread, doom, and spectacle of our Catholic childhoods." [Id.]
*"Cain ultimately didn’t invent anything. He is often celebrated as the axial figure in the history of the crime novel...Yet the [shift from detective-focus to criminal-focus] was already implicit in the literary fiction of the 1920s and 1930s that cultivated violence and gangsters – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby" (1925), Ernest Hemingway’s "The Killers" (1927), and William Faulkner’s "Sanctuary" (1931)." [ [http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/classics/intro/postman_caine.pdf#search=%22Robert%20Polito%22|Introduction "Postman"] , a work on James M. Cain, from the Random House website.]

External links

* [http://archive.salon.com/audio/bomb/2001/05/08/carey/index.html "Peter Carey Interviewed by Robert Polito] , Salon.com, May 8, 2001
* [http://www.pshares.org/authors/authordetails.cfm?prmauthorid=1214 Ploughshares articles by or about Robert Polito] , Ploughshares bibliography.

References