I first became acquainted with Robert Polito's work in 1997 when I received the gift of his beautifully bound two book American Library set, Crime Novels.
I'd never heard of Patricia Highsmith before, but after reading The Talented Mr. Ripley on a long post-Christmas Amtrak ride, I was hooked enough to imbibe the rest of her works. Highsmith soon went through a posthumous popular resurgence after Anthony Minghella's film of the first Ripley book,
This week, two writer friends sent me the link to another look at this great author in The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22797?email. The obsession with her continues.
Polito's work summons up the dark, nervous, mysterious vibe of the noir authors he has championed including wildcat author Jim Thompson, whom Polito wrote the ultimate biography of,
JD: Your book is refreshingly eclectic in form. As published, the order of pieces seems inevitable, but how did you go about trying to arrange your material?
RP: Thank you. From the outset I thought of Hollywood & God as a book, rather than a miscellany, or even a collection. One of the ways I saw the title is as the intersection of two streets - Hollywood & Vine, Hollywood & Gower, Hollywood & God. So the book mixes poetry and prose, mixes as well different sorts of poems, each piece tracking various claims on the author's life and a reader's attention, and there's a lot of collage, some obvious, some (I hope) seamless. But ultimately I wanted a total effect that might emerge out of the intersections and sudden turns of the prose and poetry, perhaps like the ghost of a novel, though without any manifest storyline. The ordering was, as you suggest, everything, or almost everything, and stayed in play right up until I was finished, when I reversed the order of two of the prose pieces, and the book felt done.
JD: Like many writers, you also teach (RP is Director of the New School's MFA in Creative Writing Program). When writing Hollywood & God how did you arrange your time to actually get your writing done?
RP: For poems, and even for the prose pieces in this book, I tend to take a ridiculously long time accumulating notes, lines, and stanzas - months, years - but finally then write them all up very quickly. Some of those notes are done at a desk, though many arrive under preposterous circumstances, such as on the bus to New Paltz, or during a New School meeting, or a poetry reading I'm introducing, or while researching some essay. Cause and effect are hard to distinguish here - do I work this way because of the fragmented life I have as a writer, teacher, and administrator, or do I have that life because of the way I work? Much of the New School fortunately happens in the afternoon and evening, so many mornings and, of course, weekends are pretty free.
JD: Your book summons up the music and the voices of many recordings and films. Do you read your work aloud while you are writing it? It feels as if you are channeling different voices. Not to ask the magician to reveal his secrets, but how do YOU do what you do?
RP: Often in Hollywood & God I was after a composite or collective voice. I spend a lot of time watching movies, and maybe more time listening to music. Way back, in a review of an Elvis Costello show I wrote in the 80s, I glibly called the singing I like "method acting singing," meaning, I guess, those spooky singers who dwell down deep in a lyric, and appear to inhabit from the inside any song they're singing, irrespective of whether they wrote it or not. Maybe Hollywood & God is in that sense a medley of voices - a medley of America singers who, at least over the expanse of a disconsonant phrase or line, believe deeply whatever they're singing.
JD: What are you working on now?
RP: I'm going over the galleys for a monumental book (900 pages!) I'm so happy to be involved with - Farber On Film: The Complete Film Writings Of Manny Farber, which I've just edited and will be out in the early fall from the Library of America. Manny was a friend, and the most amazing film critic and painter. He died last summer, at the age of 91, only a few months after his last gallery show of new work. Plus I'm on sabbatical
from the New School, and trying to finish a nonfiction book, Detours: Seven Noir Lives.
QUESTION OF THE WEEK for Key-bangers: That's all for now with RP. I'm curious, but I'm dear writers, how has music and film (or other art forms) influenced your work? Let us all know, and keep banging the keys http://www.bangthekeys.com.
Check out my writer's workshop in a book, Bang the Keys!
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