Robert Polito Discusses After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace with Amanda Petrusich

BPL Presents welcomes Robert Polito whose After the Flood asks of Bob Dylan, “If your dreams are fulfilled at twenty, what do you do with the rest of your life?” in conversation with The New Yorker's Amanda Petrusich.

A prevailing narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s, then released arguably the worst music of his career in the 1980s—only to be resurrected in 2016, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan’s concerts once began with an announcer intoning a deadpan version of just such a narrative. That is not this story.

Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, After the Flood reveals Dylan’s output during the last three decades as his most ambitious yet. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since the early 1990s, celebrated poet and biographer Robert Polito shows how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has embodied and resisted its era—interweaving Ovid and Americana, film noir and the Civil War. Imaginatively researched, After the Flood is both an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga.

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Robert Polito served as president of the Poetry Foundation from 2013 to 2015. The founding director of the Graduate Writing and Writing and Democracy Programs at the New School, Polito teaches writing and literature. For his book Savage Art, he was awarded the NBCC Award in Biography. Photo credit Kristine Harris

 

 

 

Moderator Amanda Petrusich is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of three books. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction and has been nominated for a Grammy Award. Her criticism and features have appeared in the New York Times, the Oxford American, Spin, Pitchfork, GQ, Esquire, The Atlantic, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She is the writer-in-residence at New York University’s Gallatin School.