Dusty to Polished: Robert Polito
What sparks your urge to write, is it always the same?
Terrific question! Always there’s an impulse to figure something out, or to work through something otherwise elusive, resistant. I don’t really distinguish all that much between my poems and my prose as writing, that word-by-word emergence. I just finished a prose book about the second thirty years (more or less: 1991 thru 2024) of Bob Dylan’s career, After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace, an abecedarium of twenty-six chapters. That A to Z form allowed me to be topical when I wished to inventory a topic, or chronological when his specific history was needed. But my model for the book was “The Book of Ephraim,” the first volume of James Merrill’s ouija board trilogy of poems, The Changing Light at Sandover.
Over the past few decades, there’s been an exciting and innovative convergence of poetry and nonfiction. Yet the day-to-day feasibilities of prose and poems are for me very different. A prose book along the lines of the Dylan demands To-Do lists, piles of research pages around me, and deadlines. Poems are more serendipitous, arbitrary, even providential. Still, I find the little notebooks I carry around with me crucial for writing both.
Do you follow a specific process or set of steps when editing?
Beyond reading, and rereading, and rereading more? Not really.
How do you know when a piece is truly “done” and ready for publication?
I was still making lots of word changes in the third-pass galleys of After the Flood — an editor, or a reader, interested in just the facts, observations, and ideas might tag them incidental, though I wouldn’t; and I know I would be still continuing to revise if I were permitted a fourth look through the book.
How would you describe your writing process with an image?
Here’s a still from Edgar Ulmer’s Detour, a B-movie noir that just might also be the most experimental American film of the 1940s. There Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is thumbing his way to Los Angeles, or so he thinks. Maybe writing is a bit like hitching a ride — a ride with all the writers and artists who came before, your legacies, your traditions, your exemplars and your cautionary tales; even when you believe you know where you are going, there’s likely — inevitably? — surprises good and bad along the way. And maybe the destinations don’t matter all that much, and the ride is an end in itself: the adventures and roadblocks, the detours and discoveries. Incidentally, writing in this era of AI might soon seem as retro as hitching, but that’s probably ok, too.
What do you think makes the writing community at The New School unique?
So many constituents and circumstances. Our situation in New York City — a faculty, and a reading series created through intensive collaborations with such organizations as PEN, Cave Canem, the National Book Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, among many others, that could only be possible here. There’s also the historical legacy of the New School — though not at all as a static heirloom, but instead as a challenging projection that demands continuous self-reinvention as the world pulses and shifts. But at the core are our astonishing students. This semester I’m teaching a multi-genre workshop in the MFA Program — poets, novelists, and essayists all in the same room — and an undergraduate Arts Writing workshop in the Writing & Democracy Program, that draws students from Parsons, BPATS, and Lang. Almost needless to say, living in this third decade of the 21st-century isn’t easy, but the writing I’m reading in both of these workshops is rising to our historical moment, and among the very best work I’ve encountered in all my years at the New School.
This interview series is produced by Hijab Ahmed
Bio: Robert Polito will publish three books in 2026: After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace (Liveright); Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 1960s (Library of America); and, in collaboration with Sophie Brown and Robert Rubin, Barbara Loden’s WANDA (Film Desk Books). Previous books include Savage Art, a biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the poetry collections Hollywood & God and Doubles. The founding director of the New School Graduate Writing Program and of the Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy, he served as President of the Poetry Foundation (2013-2015). Current projects include Detours, a book on noir in film and literature, and a new collection of poems.
