“People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations.” — Bob Dylan, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”
Join Bob Dylan Center Director Steven Jenkins for an online discussion with poet and scholar Robert Polito about his bold take on Dylan’s output since the early 1990s.
A prevailing narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of the 1960s counterculture, disappeared in the ‘70s then released arguably the worst music of his career in the ‘80s, 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.
Robert Polito has other ideas. Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, “After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace” reveals Dylan’s creative work 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 ‘90s, the celebrated poet and biographer 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—partially in the Bob Dylan Archives in Tulsa—”After the Flood” is both an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga.
Blending biography and archival history, “After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace” asks of Bob Dylan, “If your dreams are fulfilled at twenty, what do you do with the rest of your life?”
Presenting Supporters: Joe Donnelly and Becky Thorson
Details:
This event will take place virtually via Zoom.
Thursday, Sept. 17, 2026
6 p.m. CT
Tickets:
$5 for nonmembers
Free for Bob Dylan Center members
About Robert Polito:
Robert Polito’s poetry collections include “Hollywood & God” and “Doubles,” and his scholarly works include “A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s ‘The Changing Light at Sandover’” and “Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson,” for which he received the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award. Polito served as president of the Poetry Foundation for two years, and his many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.
About the Bob Dylan Center Book Club:
The Bob Dylan Center Book Club is a series of conversations with writers, artists and performers about their latest releases. Featured authors discuss their memoirs, share stories of their adventures in the music industry, and delve deep into the careers and legacies of pivotal figures. In keeping with the mission and activities of the Bob Dylan Center, which celebrate fearless creativity, conversations focus on stirring music, iconic musicians and the mysteries of the creative process.
Book Club sessions take place on Zoom on every other month, begin at 6:00 pm CT, last for one hour, and are open to Bob Dylan Center members and the general public. Bob Dylan Center Director Steven Jenkins moderates the conversations with a diverse range of guests, and registrants are invited to contribute questions and comments via the Zoom chat box.
