Interview #36: David Polonoff

Scribe who's served time on both coasts

David Polonoff is a commentator and columnist, author and cultural historian, whose premiere novel WannaBeat, published by Trouser Press Books, is only quite recently out of the traps. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in Portland and San Francisco, Polonoff has immersed himself in the worlds of both coasts – the new book is set in the San Francisco of the 1970s – but today he resides in New York.

He takes a particular pleasure in chronicling the last half-century or so of bohemian activity and says that he is been drawn to most of the countercultural movements – from Beat and hippie to punk and beyond – during those times. His satirical jottings on society and politics appeared regularly in publications like the Village Voice, East Village Eye and New York Newsday in the 1980s and 1990s.

We carry a review of WannaBeat elsewhere in the pages of Rock and the Beat Generation, but here editor Simon Warner interviews Polonoff about his literary influences, including his attraction to Beat, of course, the methods he employed to bring an earlier period in North Beach history to fresh fictional life and the tangle of subcultural strands that have been drawn to Kerouac, Ginsberg and their ilk over the decades…

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Simon Warner: Greetings, David. Having much enjoyed reading WannaBeat, I wanted initially to raise a query or two about the genre your novel falls into. Back in the 1980s, I consumed blank generation novels aplenty and I was thinking that your sharp, smart, sardonic style had something in common with the work that Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Mary Gaitskill and others produced at that time, writing with a certain urban attitude, a transgressive edge.

Yet I was then wondering, here is your own piece of fiction written 40 years on from that or… is this piece of writing something you largely laid down in the late 1970s and then essentially reactivated for the 2020s! If you could cast a little light on this it would be helpful.

David Polonoff: I wrote WannaBeat entirely between 2018 and 2023. It began as what I thought would be a short story and just kept growing until it became a novel. I had always wanted to write about that period in my life and the history surrounding it, but I had never outlined or envisioned how to do so. As I worked on the book, I thought of it (with some grandiosity) as occupying a territory somewhere between Bukowski and Proust – at once grittily personal and broadly social.

Nevertheless, the affinity you noticed to the 'Brat Pack’ writers is interesting. In a way I belong to that generation of writers, though McInerney is five years younger and Ellis younger still. I lived in New York in the 1980s and wrote short satirical pieces for the East Village Eye and Village Voice.

The instant success of Bright Lights, Big City drove publishers to seek out writers from the downtown scene, and, for a few heady months, I was groomed by Vintage Press – Jay, Bret and Tama’s publisher – in hopes that I would produce something saleable for them. Unfortunately, I wasn’t ready to undertake a novel and having a more radical edge than those apolitical writers, I managed to self-sabotage myself out of their good graces. Something I have lamented through many subsequent years of obscurity. So, in a sense with WannaBeat, I am finally claiming my place within their ranks, the most senior Brat of the Pack.

Addendum: Vintage Books pioneered a kind of literary fiction that appealed to the mass market through its highly readable style – McInerney’s second person coke binges and Ellis’ cool MTV-swathed present tense. Though less gimmicky, my book shares this style-forward quality. I endeavoured to keep the prose moving at a pace where even complex philosophical reflections were encompassed in the narrative flow. In this respect, I do see the similarity in our work.

SW: Is this your first published novel?

DP: Yes. WannaBeat is my first published novel.

I published a collection of my short pieces entitled Down the Yup Staircase in the mid-’90s. It is long since out of print, but I’m thinking of reviving some of those pieces on my Substack in a section called ‘Live from the 20th Century’.

Pictured above: Novelist and columnist David Polonoff

SW: To what extent was your writing in San Francisco in the late 1970s the template for this current piece of work? Did you salvage memories, even actual text, for these new episodes?

DP: My writing from the ‘70s played an enormous role in the creation of the novel. I never included any text from the many notebooks I kept – though I occasionally considered using some as the protagonist’s internal monologue – but I constantly consulted them to remind myself of feelings, chronology and especially to remember what it was like to be ensconced in that historical moment not knowing what the future would bring.

I also had boxes full of memorabilia, letters, postcards, clippings, bills, pay stubs, photos, even an eviction notice, each of which contributed to the vibe I was trying to conjure. I wanted to relive the struggles of the past through my current eyes without denigrating my emotions as I then felt them with bits of subsequent wisdom.

When my own past writing and keepsakes failed me, I found the magic of Google indispensable. I often had a dim memory of a place or time I wasn’t even sure was real only to track it down online with such accuracy that it opened a whole new vault of memory. This led me to call my work a ‘digitally remastered memoir’. Until I realised that I didn’t just want to write about things as they happened, but as they could or should have happened – in other words to add a thick layer of fiction.

Here too Google helped me by presenting the details of events and situations that could then be experienced through my protagonist’s eyes. And my notebooks helped as well by reminding me of desires and ambitions that could now find fulfilment.

SW: What is your take on the Beat scene of that time, 50 years on – or more generally? Is there a legacy that survives from that community of poets?

DP: As the title of my book implies, the late ‘70s North Beach scene was largely composed of wannabe beatniks – artists and rebels, searching for a way of being in the aftermath of the counterculture in a world hurtling toward Reaganism, who looked to the Beats as role models. Many of the original Beats were in and out of the neighbourhood and their hangouts – Trieste, Vesuvio, City Lights – were still going strong. You could just hang around, scribble in your notebook and feel like you were part of literary history,

Most of us wannabeats moved on to forms of expression more authentic to the era, like punk. But a small coterie, the ‘Baby Beats’, laid claim to the mantle of Beatdom and styled themselves its next generation. There really isn’t much of a legacy from their scene. It was mainly aspirational and produced no works of major consequence that I know of. Their main publication, the revived Beatitudes, is hard to find and their performative emphasis meant that most of their work vanished along with the readings in which it was presented.

Ironically it is this production of mass readings itself that constitutes what legacy they have passed on. The Baby Beats organised the first San Francisco International Poetry Festival which continues to this day. At the time it consisted of close to a hundred poets and went on for two days, packing the San Franisco civic center. This, along with the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York, pioneered the idea of poetry as a popular entertainment comparable to a rock concert – an idea revived by the Spoken Word movement of the 1990s and the current upsurge in alt-lit readings in New York and LA.

SW: Do the Beat Generation writers still have an appeal for you as a reader, writer or romantic? Does a Beat ethic or aesthetic still inform your output today?

DP: Very much so. As a reader I’m eager to spend some time with the lesser works of Kerouac that I’ve never gotten to, along with the original scroll of On the Road. I reread Burroughs’ Junkie while writing WannaBeat and was surprised that his style reminded me of my own, except with the driest of humour in place of my broader strokes. The rest of the Beats, Ginsberg included, are there mainly as a resonance, a reference point, a set of phrases and rhythms that have infused American consciousness whether you recognise the influence or not. Much like Shakespeare and English.

And that’s what is most important for me as a writer: the Beat, to coin a phrase. The music. The cadence. The syncopation. The Beats opened our literature up to the full pulse of American life. The blues. Jazz. Ginsberg’s cantor warble. The roar of a Chevy motor. The hum of the highway. Mark Twain’s riverboat boat wheel. Motion. A heart beating inside each sentence impelling the narrative forward even when there’s no story to tell. That’s what I tried to emulate in my book. A constant motion, which in my case also incorporates moments of political analysis and philosophical reflection.

At same time, as a dutiful citizen of postmodernity and the algorithmic age, I cannot share the Beats’ romanticism. Irony rules my roost. Not the facile irony of the internet, but the recognition that even peak moments of creativity, as when the Beats all assembled in Denver or North Beach or Tangiers, or when Coltrane hit the highest notes of Ascension, or Hendrix ate the ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ with his guitar, even these do not lead to a new and better world but to a return of everyday life.

SW: As someone also engaged in and gripped by the punk eruption of the mid-1970s, could I ask you to comment on a subcultural conundrum: the Beats seemed to be close to perfect fit with the hippies, yet those writers' influences appeared to vault the tribal barricades and appeal to the punks, post punks and new wavers, too, even though they saw the hippies as their adversaries. Do you have any thoughts on that apparent paradox?

DP: The Beats were a subculture of rebellion and creative protest against the conformity and homogeneity of postwar American life. The hippies, due in part to the demographics of the baby boom generation, represented a mass movement aspiring to the transformation of consciousness and society.

The forces they opposed – materialism, sexual repression, corporate culture – were much the same and the means they adopted to combat them – psychedelic mind expansion, ‘Eastern’ religion, poetic and rock‘n’roll incantations – were similar, but their ambitions were different. The hippies were messianic, aiming to unite the world in peace and love even when this might involve revolutionary struggle. ‘In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate our minds/ In loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction’, sang the Jefferson Airplane.

The Beats on the other hand – Kerouac in particular – were content to carve out a spot for their individuality, creativity and alienation. Howl though they might about about the fate of the ‘best minds of [their] generation’, they did not feel the need to remake the world to correct that fate, nor did they feel (with the possible exception of Ginsberg) that it was within their powers to do so.

When the hippie counterculture collapsed under the combined weight of Nixon, bad drugs, the end of the Vietnam war, and the collective realisation of the need to make a living, all it left behind were the paraphernalia and pieties without the animating revolutionary spirit. Life returned to workaday normal and the hippie aesthetics of back-to-nature, kaleidoscopic symmetry and mellowness were absorbed into fashion, commercials and New Age capitalism.

As for the punk point you raise, by the late seventies alienated youth writhing against the strictures of an earth-toned conformity could only see the remains of hippiedom as part of the problem. They did not want to be holistically healed; they wanted to express their deformity. To howl and scream again.

They rejected the natural and organic in favour of the jagged, edgy, asymmetrical, and urban. The Beats, with their minimalist black attire, noirish cafes and jazz clubs, and deep dives into their own existential pain without hope of a generational cavalry coming to their rescue, felt like kindred spirits.

I do believe that the Beat repertoire and mythos contains a core element of rebellion and transgression untied to any particular programme of its enactment and thus can inspire and empower movements of many stripes, be they revolutionary or simple outbursts of rage against the machine.

SW: Please cast a little more light on the hugely entertaining chapter involving a Corso clone! All the signs were it was him, but was it?

DP: My book is partly autobiographical but often diverges into fiction. Many of the characters and events are ones I knew and experienced, but others are unique to Philip, my protagonist. Corso was around North Beach in the late ‘70s, but I never personally met him. Philip, on the other hand, did meet up with the actual Corso that evening and went on to have the semi-slapstick series of misadventures that I recount.

I took much of my portrait of Corso from the memoirs of his close friends of the era, particularly his then girlfriend. Though many of these accounts revolve around his drug use and propensity for sleeping in strangers’ cars; they also lovingly capture the multi-faceted personality of a brilliant poet.

I didn’t want to feel that I was exploiting his friends’ intimate memories by accentuating the more unsavoury side of his character. So, I decided to refer to him as the ‘Corso-clone’ and make him into more of a head-bopping hipster archetype than a specific individual.

SW: Can I assume that novel’s touching dedication references your own brother Danny?

DP: Yes, that part of the book was largely autobiographical. One of my main motivations for writing it was to grapple with the trauma of his illness, lymphoma, and the role it played in driving him toward as much success as he could achieve in his foreshortened lifespan and me on a search for meaning and creative renewal – a search which continues to his day.

SW: What are you doing at the moment? What are you working on?

Currently, I am mainly working on my Substack, Tropelessness, writing on many of the same themes as WannaBeat but in a contemporary context. There is currently a burgeoning literary scene in New York and LA, with readings (often several of them) every night of the week.

The participants are mostly an amalgam of millennials and Gen Z (‘zillennials’) who write first-person present-tense ‘autofiction’ trying to decipher their real from their online lives. Not necessarily familiar with their predecessors, they have nonetheless produced a new bohemia where writers – astonishingly! – are accorded the stature once reserved for rock musicians.

I braved the generational divide and ventured into this scene to promote WannaBeat and have since achieved something of a presence within it. One of my most successful Substack posts describes going to a reading in the East Village through the ghosts of punk, Basquiat and Haring to meet the creative energies of the present. This gave me the idea for a new novel, moving back and forth in time between the New York of the ‘80s and the current moment, which I hope to begin work on this summer.

See also: ‘Book review #48: WannaBeat’, May 17th, 2025