Please join us for the first US installment of 2015 season of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome, featuring a discussion between two leading figures in poetry, Edward Hirsch (1989 Fellow) and Robert Polito, at the New School in New York. They will discuss ways of reading and listening to poetry, the importance of reading translations of poems written in foreign languages, and the interactions between poetry and other arts.

Celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry, Edward Hirsch is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Rome Prize (1989), a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), won the National Book Critics Award. Since then, he has published seven additional books of poems, including most recently, Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that the New Yorker calls “a masterpiece of sorrow.” Hirsch is also the author of five prose books, including A Poet’s Glossary (2014), the result of decades of passionate study, Poet’s Choice (2006), which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller.

The poet and scholar Robert Polito earned his PhD from Harvard and has served as director of Creative Writing at the New School for two decades. Polito’s collections of poetry include Hollywood & God (2009) and Doubles (1995). His poetry blends narrative and lyric impulses, drawing on both American pop culture and literary tradition. Polito’s scholarly works include A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (1995), and Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (1996), for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Polito’s interest in midcentury American culture, especially the crime novel and film noir, has also led him to such editing projects as Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (2009); The Selected Poems of Kenneth Fearing (2004); Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s (1997); Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s (1997); and editions of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain for the Everyman Library. He has contributed a catalogue essay to About Face (1985); a retrospective of Manny Farber’s paintings; an essay on the Kinks for This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project (2004); an essay on Bob Dylan to Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader (2005); and an essay on Allen Ginsberg to Howl: Fifty Years Later (2006). He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. A contributing editor to both BOMB and the Boston Review, Polito has written poetry and criticism that have been published widely. He is at work on a new book titled Detours: Seven Noir Lives.