January 23, 2013 – The Poetry Foundation, located in River North, has hired a new president. Dr. Robert Polito will start work on July 8, taking over for the foundation’s first president, John Barr, who announced his retirement last year.

For the past 20 years, Polito has been director of creative writing at The New School, a university in New York. Originally from Boston, the 61-year-old has a doctorate from Harvard University in English and American language and literature.

He is also a poet. His poems have been collected into two books. According to the Poetry Foundation, his poetry “blends lyric, collage, and narrative impulses – and draws on both American pop culture and literary tradition.”

Besides editing books on poetry, cinema, and popular culture of the mid-20th century, Polito has written about Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Orson Wells, crime novelist Jim Thompson, and the music of The Kinks.

The foundation’s magazine, Poetry, celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. In an interview published Wednesday on the Poetry Foundation website, Polito praised the Modernist poets such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound that the magazine introduced to its readers.

“You turn on your computer, and what do you immediately encounter? Fragmentation, collage, and unreliable narrators – that’s Modernism, but it is also the grain of daily life for nearly everyone alive today. You might even say that the Modernist poets and novelists – James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Eliot, and Pound – invented, or certainly at least anticipated, the Internet.”

The Poetry Foundation was established in 2002 with a $200 million endowment from philanthropist Ruth Lilly.

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