Hollywood & God

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Hollywood & God (eBook) Pub. Date: 8/1/2009 Publisher: University of Chicago Press
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Hollywood & God Pub. Date: 4/1/2009 Publisher: University of Chicago Press

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Overview

from Hollywood & God

. . . this hour I tell you things in confidence,

I might not tell everybody, but I’ll tell you.

The world is a road under the wall to the church,

the world is a church, & the world is a road,

& the world is a stone wall.

Still, he wanted her the way the Cardinal wanted the Caravaggio,

& when the ill-advised possessor of the painting resisted—

one night Papal Guards searched his house.

Of course contraband came to light, some illegal rifles,

& when the ill-advised possessor of the painting went to prison—

the Cardinal got his Caravaggio.

But I wasn’t a Cardinal, nephew to the Pope,

and you—

you were not a Caravaggio.

So I asked you to be in my movie.

Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing—even lurid—hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today’s Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who (we think) we think we are fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, ascontemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

Praise for Doubles

“The poems in this collection are as striking for their language, which reveals a subtle rhetorical intelligence, as for their dramas, which exist in an atmosphere charged with violence. Polito handles his volatile material with an almost ritual caution: an instinct for structure and symmetry guides his descent into the underworld of adulterous betrayal and psychic exposure.”—New Yorker

Editorial Reviews

Bookforum

“Hollywood—metonym for all worldly desires—hasn’t replaced God, according to Polito; both are receding into the past at exactly the same velocity. . . . Every bid for transcendence foregrounds a lack. What would we do without that lack? stop worrying and enjoy your life, enjoined the bus ads; our poets, like the wistful Polito . . . it’s not that simple.”—Bookforum

— Ange Mlinko

Booklist

“The title can stand as the best terse summation of American culture on record. . . . Polito is cobra-fascinating in his second poetry collection. Each finely patterned, muscular line holds wonder and menace.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist

— Donna Seaman

More Reviews (3) Fewer Reviews

Brooklyn Rail

“Clean, decisive, and yet shimmering with the too-real clarity of a dream, Polito’s poetry is part craving, and all desire. . . . And he makes a convincing case for a Gnostic revelation—the strumming need in the American soul is the spark of the divine, which of course is manifested in the all-too imperfect expression pop culture.”—Brooklyn Rail

Entertainment Weekly

"Politi makes poetry out of pop-culture in a way that deepens, not cheapens, either the poem or the pop. Elvis Presley, the Edgar G, Ulmer thriller Detour, and Dunkin Donuts all put in appearances in poems whose lines snake across the page, wrapping themselves around rhythms that surprise and hypnotize."

— Ken Tucker

Publishers Weekly

Split between oddly angled bits of memoir and acts of Hollywood ventriloquy, this second poetry collection from Polito (Doubles) leaps between essays and lyrics, between theology and violence, between tell-alls and persona poems. "If only God would save me," Polito writes in the title poem, "I would know how to hurt you," with the kind of drama and intimacy that infuses many of the voices here. Even Paris Hilton weighs in on spiritual matters ("My God makes me feel good"). A story about a starlet who falls into a life of drinking, prostitution and poetry doubles as a sad coming-of-age tale, while "Please Refrain from Talking During the Movie" mixes interior and exterior voices, joining much in this book that's overheard, quoted and borrowed: love moans through hotel walls, instructions from an astrologer and memorized pieces of the Baltimore Catechism. Confused seekers also abound: a woman who thinks the "owlish man" she lives with is Bob Dylan; another woman who's conflation of her own face, Elvis and God ends tragically; and a man in search of a tintype of his grandmother that may or may not exist. Three personal essays anchor the poems, each a story about interrogating self and god, whether fallen, falling apart or missing altogether. (Apr.)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226673394
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 4/1/2009
Pages: 88
Series: Phoenix Poets Series
Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 8.60 (h) x 0.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Robert Polito

Robert Polito is director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing and professor of writing at The New School. He is the author of Doubles, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Hollywood Hills 3

Barbara Payton: A Memoir 5

Paris Hilton Calls on Jesus 12

Two or Three Dreams About 14

Mike the Winger 17

Please Refrain From Talking During The Movie 20

Overheard in the Love Hotel 22

New York School 25

Three Horse Operas 26

What a Friend 27

Deep Deuce 28

The Harrowing of Dorchester 30

Confidential 41

Shooting Star 43

Sister Elvis 44

Pacific Coast Highway 50

Spicy Detective 51

Riding with the King 52

The Great Awakening 55

Last Seen 60

Hollywood & God 62

Shame 66

Notes 73

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