Chronicling The Shadowy Crimes Of Hollywood And God
“Robert Polito, the director of the creative writing program at The New School since 1992, has been named the new president of the Poetry Foundation, based in Chicago,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Polito will begin his tenure on July 8. The organization’s inaugural president, John Barr, who caused occasional ripples in the poetry world, is set to retire but will stay on until July and then help with the transition.
“Mr. Polito is a poet, critic and author of several books, including Savage Art, a biography of the crime writer Jim Thompson that won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995.”
Polito then moved on to Hollywood and God in a collection of that name.
“Ever sense I wrote a biography of crime novelist Jim Thompson I’ve stayed fascinated with noir, and for me at least there are echoes of noir in ‘Hollywood & God,” he wrote in 2009.
“But I first arrived at noir, whether Thompson, David Goodis, or Patricia Highsmith, through Samuel Beckett: those beautiful sentences saying the most awful things.”
Here’s Polito reading two poems by the Oak Park poet of the Depression Kenneth Fearing at NoirCon in Philadelphia in 2010.
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Bio deets from the Poetry Foundation press release:
“Born in Boston in 1951, he earned a doctorate in English and American language and literature from Harvard University.
Polito’s poetry, which blends lyric, collage, and narrative impulses and draws on both American pop culture and literary tradition, has been collected in two books, Hollywood & God (2009) and Doubles (1995).
“His scholarly works include A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (1995) and Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (1996), for which he received a National Book Critics Circle Award.
“Polito’s interest in crime novels and film noir has served him as editor of several books on cinema, poetry, and popular culture of the American midcentury.
“He has written about Manny Farber’s paintings, the music of the Kinks, Andy Warhol and Andrew Marvell, Bob Dylan, the Pogues, Orson Welles, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Vigo, and Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl,’ among many other subjects.”
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Comments welcome.
Posted on January 24, 2013