From childhood on, Pollack wanted to be a writer. Poetry was his first love, but he was less interested in his moods than in inventing stories. After college he tried, without conviction, to write novels. The solution, narrative poetry, was not obvious; in modern times, everyone who writes in this form must reinvent it. In 1979, Pollack wrote the first poem he still likes. A few years later he met Robert McDowell, whose Story Line Press was devoted to narrative. In 1986 Story Line published Pollack’s first book-length poem, The Adventure, and in 1998 his second, Happiness; a third remains unpublished.

Though Frederick Pollack left Chicago when he was 15, he still considers himself “spiritually” a Chicagoan. He attended high school in Palo Alto, earned a BA from Yale and, much later, an MA from San Francisco State. At Yale he studied under Harold Bloom, whose influence he gradually shook off. He lived for many years in Berkeley, alone; then, married, in Los Angeles. His wife, Phylis Geller, is a painter and former television producer. Since 1995 they have lived in Washington, DC, where Pollack taught creative writing at George Washington University. He retired in 2018.

Since 1998 his poems have for the most part been short, combining lyric and narrative elements. Many of his poems have appeared in print and online literary journals. A collection, A Poverty of Words, was published by Prolific Press in 2015; another, Landscape with Mutant, by Smokestack Books (UK) in 2018. Besides the great American narrativists E. A. Robinson and Robinson Jeffers, Pollack counts among his influences H. D., Ekelöf, Reznikoff, Montale, and Zbigniew Herbert.

Zoe