Show Notes:
Of all the personae Dylan has performed throughout his seven-decade career, the most enduring is the one from the 1960s when he burst into the American consciousness, initially as a Guthrie-esque folksinger of protest songs dubbed, much to his consternation, the “voice of a generation.” Though many in his original fanbase felt betrayed when he plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, pictures of Dylan’s Carnaby Street-hipster “poet laureate of rock and roll” dominate our imaginations. These iterations of Dylan in this four-year span have left an indelible impression on fans, young and old alike. This is attributed to his unparalleled creative growth and output in such a short time, especially the three mid-sixties albums, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. However, in his new book, After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace, poet, scholar, and professor, Robert Polito, complicates our understanding of Dylan’s creative genius, asserting that Dylan’s late-style works since 1991 represent Dylan at the height of his creativity and genius. During this period, Dylan continued touring and writing some of the best songs of his career, but also expanded his creative output to include visual arts through paintings and ironwork sculptures, wrote, produced, and starred in Masked and Anonymous, wrote two books, and recorded a total of 102 episodes of his Sirius XM show Theme Time Radio Hour. In this episode, Robert and I discuss After the Flood and, more broadly, his body of work over his impressive career.
Bio:
Robert Polito’s most recent books include After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace (2026) and Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s and 1960s (2026). Later this year, in collaboration with Sophie Brown and Robert Rubin, he will also publish The Gray World: Barbara Loden’s Wanda. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Savage Art, his biography of novelist Jim Thompson. Polito founded the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the New School, and served as President of the Poetry Foundation (2013-2015). Other books include collections of poems (Doubles; Hollywood & God), and anthologies for the Library of America — American Noir: Classic Crime Novels of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber; and David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 1950s.
Links:
After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780871402936
Books: https://www.writersreps.com/Robert-Polito
Poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-polito
Instagram: @politorobert
X: @Fantomas2go
