Robert Polito
Columnist George Frazier, reviewing one of Polito's Stylus issues in the Boston Globe, wrote, "I happen to think it may well be the most sophisticated and subtle undergraduate literary magazine I have ever seen.
His thesis, At the Titan's Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron's Poetry, was published in 1987 in the Garland-Routledge series, Harvard Dissertations in English and American Literature.
From 1983 to 1988 he wrote about literature and popular music for The Boston Phoenix, including articles about Elizabeth Bishop, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, Jim Thompson, and the Turbines.
Barnes and Noble identified Hollywood & God as one of the top five poetry books of the year, remarking that "this collection is shattered, mythic, and dazzling.
From 2004–2006 Polito wrote a column for Bookforum, "Shoot the Piano Player," where he covered noir in literature, film, and visual art.
Polito identified the distinctive characteristics of the New School Graduate Writing program as including "the finest and most various group of faculty writers in the country" and a public reading series of nearly fifty events each semester, sometimes on-sponsored with other New York literary organizations, such as the Academy of American Poets, the National Book Foundation, PEN America Center, Cave Canem, and the Poetry Society of America.
Alongside traditional and contemporary literature and culture, Polito saw the Internet as "axial to the Writing & Democracy Program, for both everyday practice and overall design.
The once radical innovations of Modernist literature—unreliable narrators, multiple voices, fragmentation, collage, ricocheting allusions, and instabilities of language and identity—now are the routine givens of our daily online life, whether at home or the office, our public or private selves.
At the New School, Polito also founded ASHLAB, a digital mapping of poet John Ashbery's Hudson, New York house in light of his written work.
[8] Polito team-taught an ASHLAB graduate seminar with digital designer Irwin Chen and poets Tom Healy and Adam Fitzgerald.
[9] Soon after the announcement, Meghan O'Rourke reported that Critics argue that the [Poetry] foundation, led by an investment banker and poet named John Barr, hasn't spent its money wisely or aggressively enough.
"[11] He embraced the Modernist legacy of "innovation, experiment, and discovery that originated over a hundred years ago when Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine."
He created poet exchanges with other countries, including France and Italy, and worked closely with other poetry and arts organizations in Chicago and across America.
"[11] Polito inaugurated a reading series, The Open Door, that featured faculty and students from Chicago's graduate and undergraduate writing programs.
In 2014 Mark Ford received the Pegasus Award, and in 2013 the recipient was the University of California Press for the Collected Writings of Robert Duncan.
Readers and writers of poems know that the personal enrichment of a life through poetry is matched by the public and professional skills close attention to language provides.
