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“After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace”
An Online Conversation with Robert Polito
Item details
Date
September 17, 2026 6:00PM
Description
“After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace”
An Online Conversation with Robert Polito
“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
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.
Ticket Information
Members: Free Admission
Non-Members: $5.00 plus tax
This event will be available virtually via Zoom
Members: Please log in to access your benefits. For questions or information about becoming a member, please contact members@bobdylancenter.com.