- 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 theNational Book Critics Circle Award and anEdgar 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 inNew York City . He received a Ph.D. in English and American Language and Literature fromHarvard 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 'sThe Changing Light at Sandover "; and "At the Titan's Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron's Poetry". Editor of theLibrary 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 theJohn Simon Guggenheim Foundation s. Contributing editor of "BOMB " and "The Boston Review ". Has taught at Harvard, Wellesley, andNew 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 andGeorge Plimpton ’s oral history ofEdie 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 , andAndy 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 myBoston 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), andWilliam Faulkner ’s "Sanctuary " (1931)." [ [http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/classics/intro/postman_caine.pdf#search=%22Robert%20Polito%22|Introduction "Postman"] , a work onJames M. Cain , from theRandom 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
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