A most excellent interview. Funny that Polonoff, who's a few years older than me, shared the experience of migrating from New Haven to SF.
This pithy comment on the situation in SF in the late 70's and early '80s is spot on, "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."
By contrast, I'm in partial agreement with his comments about the affinity between beat culture and the punks. Ginzberg in particular had an affinity for the Dead Kennedy's as I believe he mentions the interview you published in Kerouac: A Literary Soundtrack.
There is a very important distinction though between when the Beats came of age and when the San Francisco punk scene blossomed. The Beats, while in some respects one might argue that they were harbingers of post-modernism, their work unfolded in a modernist context, and in an important sense Howl can be read and understood as a manifesto. The Beat movement formed during an era in roads were opening rapidly to what can be read as a boundless future. Punk culture arrived at a post-modern moment. Doors were closed, the generation was blank, and no future was written on the wall. Beat writing was celebratory, holy, and impassion, and, at times painfully, sincere. While punk culture, in part expressed the rage of thwarted youth, it was also self-deprecating, playful, funny, and profoundly ironic. Pogoing, slamming, and thrashing in the mosh pit were intense, thrilling, and intimate in their chaotic expression of life and lives going nowhere--and that was the point. How different novels of the road, of Big Sur, Buddhist practice in a Western context, and poems like Sunflower Sutra that still sing today.
I very much look forward to his next novel about the scene in New York in the 80s. Once again, a most engaging and thoughtful interview.
Re my suggestion that we need a comprehensive Beat/punk history perhaps you Marc and David Polonoff could collaborate! I should also mention James Sullivan's fine essay on these matters in my own co-edited collection Kerouac on Record.
Thank you for the vote of confidence. It would be fun to collaborate on a project with David some time. I'm not an historian though, just a simple poet, so writing an history of Beat/punk is well beyond my ken. I would think that Michael Stewart Foley, or someone of his ilk, would be ideal for such a project.
You make some very interesting points there, Marc, on the Beat-punk nexus. It has always intrigued me and I think that, while books like Victor Bockris' Beat Punks touch upon this association, I really think there is space for full-length volume analysing the inter-relationship, covering New York and San Francisco, LA and London, Liverpool and Manchester, which hasn't appeared so far. The same applies to Beat and the history of black music styles from Gil Scott-Heron to Mos Def and beyond: how far did Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman inspire the Last Poets, Grandmaster Flash and the whole hip hop revolution?
I'll have alot more to say regarding this whole thread, but for the moment, two quick thoughts: (1) "Search and Destroy," the signature publication covering the SF punk scene was edited by V.Vale, who worked at City Lights, and staffed by several of his fellow clerks. So there was a direct line between Beat culture and the representation and the self-perception of the west coast punk scene. (2) Linton Kwesi Johnson would also seem to be a key figure in black music/beat-affected poetry's influence on punk (at least in UK).
I know Val. His Search and Destroy and his later Re/Search were absolutely the signature publications of that scene, along with Verna Wilson's and Linda Walker's publication, Ripper. And yes, regarding Linton Kwesi Johnson's role.
I'm in partial agreement with your partial agreement LOL. My book in many ways is a portrait (in miniature) of our society's first encounter with the postmodern moment. I was quite consciously mirroring Deleuze in writing it. The two great master narratives of the post-Enlightenment West -- political and personal liberation (Marx & Freud)-- have reached dead-ends. Not just as theoretical constructs but in the demise of the hippie/yippie/campus uprising quest for revolution and higher consciousness. Creative individuals are forced to confront their own alienation against this pervasive nihilism and find a way of being in the absence of any transcendent purpose. The wannabeats of my book look to the OG Beats as role models in alienation, but the Beats way out --Zen, drugs, the boundless road -- are insufficient. The wannabeats must learn to play within the ruins, to transform the blankness of a generation into the blankness of a page on which to invent new forms of jouissance, which as you put it, are at once "self-deprecating, playful, funny, and profoundly ironic."
I'm in complete agreement with your point about learning to play in the ruins and to invent new forms of jouissance. A poem of mine, P(UN)K Poets: Too Fucked to Drink that was published about ten years ago (and debuted on stage at the 40th Anniversary of SF Punk Rock presented by the Punk Rock Sewing Circle) speaks directly to this, offering in its final lines a non-foundational call to action. You're spot on in portraying the subcultural moment in which your novel is set as our society's first encounter with the post-modern, and the inadequacy of the Beat path to that moment. This is the premise of the poem I mention, one I engage as well in a collection of fictive verse called La Commedia Sotterranea della Macchina da Scrivere. Truly a pleasure getting to know your work and to encounter a fellow writer whose experience resonates so strongly with my own.
Punk Rock Sewing Circle😂 I would love to read that poem. Is it in La Commedia? If not could you send it (dpolonoff@nyc.rr.com)? I too am very pleased at meeting you and the resonance!
It's not in La Commedia. It's in a book called the Underwater Typewriter. I'll send you a copy of that, along with a verse fragment on the UK-LA punk connection that's in the yet to be published second folio from the Typewriter Underground.
PS I did an SF launch of my book last September at Winston Smith's Studio Fallout in North Beach (https://www.studiofallout.com). I see on IG that Winston is having a retrospective there on June 6. You may want to attend (assuming you are living in Bay Area),
Btw, in preparation for that prospective novel involving '80s NYC, I've been posting some of my pieces from that period on my substack @tropelessness in a section called Live From the 29th Century, which you might enjoy.
A most excellent interview. Funny that Polonoff, who's a few years older than me, shared the experience of migrating from New Haven to SF.
This pithy comment on the situation in SF in the late 70's and early '80s is spot on, "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."
By contrast, I'm in partial agreement with his comments about the affinity between beat culture and the punks. Ginzberg in particular had an affinity for the Dead Kennedy's as I believe he mentions the interview you published in Kerouac: A Literary Soundtrack.
There is a very important distinction though between when the Beats came of age and when the San Francisco punk scene blossomed. The Beats, while in some respects one might argue that they were harbingers of post-modernism, their work unfolded in a modernist context, and in an important sense Howl can be read and understood as a manifesto. The Beat movement formed during an era in roads were opening rapidly to what can be read as a boundless future. Punk culture arrived at a post-modern moment. Doors were closed, the generation was blank, and no future was written on the wall. Beat writing was celebratory, holy, and impassion, and, at times painfully, sincere. While punk culture, in part expressed the rage of thwarted youth, it was also self-deprecating, playful, funny, and profoundly ironic. Pogoing, slamming, and thrashing in the mosh pit were intense, thrilling, and intimate in their chaotic expression of life and lives going nowhere--and that was the point. How different novels of the road, of Big Sur, Buddhist practice in a Western context, and poems like Sunflower Sutra that still sing today.
I very much look forward to his next novel about the scene in New York in the 80s. Once again, a most engaging and thoughtful interview.
Re my suggestion that we need a comprehensive Beat/punk history perhaps you Marc and David Polonoff could collaborate! I should also mention James Sullivan's fine essay on these matters in my own co-edited collection Kerouac on Record.
Thank you for the vote of confidence. It would be fun to collaborate on a project with David some time. I'm not an historian though, just a simple poet, so writing an history of Beat/punk is well beyond my ken. I would think that Michael Stewart Foley, or someone of his ilk, would be ideal for such a project.
You make some very interesting points there, Marc, on the Beat-punk nexus. It has always intrigued me and I think that, while books like Victor Bockris' Beat Punks touch upon this association, I really think there is space for full-length volume analysing the inter-relationship, covering New York and San Francisco, LA and London, Liverpool and Manchester, which hasn't appeared so far. The same applies to Beat and the history of black music styles from Gil Scott-Heron to Mos Def and beyond: how far did Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman inspire the Last Poets, Grandmaster Flash and the whole hip hop revolution?
I'll have alot more to say regarding this whole thread, but for the moment, two quick thoughts: (1) "Search and Destroy," the signature publication covering the SF punk scene was edited by V.Vale, who worked at City Lights, and staffed by several of his fellow clerks. So there was a direct line between Beat culture and the representation and the self-perception of the west coast punk scene. (2) Linton Kwesi Johnson would also seem to be a key figure in black music/beat-affected poetry's influence on punk (at least in UK).
I know Val. His Search and Destroy and his later Re/Search were absolutely the signature publications of that scene, along with Verna Wilson's and Linda Walker's publication, Ripper. And yes, regarding Linton Kwesi Johnson's role.
Excellent points. Both would be fascinating histories.
I'm in partial agreement with your partial agreement LOL. My book in many ways is a portrait (in miniature) of our society's first encounter with the postmodern moment. I was quite consciously mirroring Deleuze in writing it. The two great master narratives of the post-Enlightenment West -- political and personal liberation (Marx & Freud)-- have reached dead-ends. Not just as theoretical constructs but in the demise of the hippie/yippie/campus uprising quest for revolution and higher consciousness. Creative individuals are forced to confront their own alienation against this pervasive nihilism and find a way of being in the absence of any transcendent purpose. The wannabeats of my book look to the OG Beats as role models in alienation, but the Beats way out --Zen, drugs, the boundless road -- are insufficient. The wannabeats must learn to play within the ruins, to transform the blankness of a generation into the blankness of a page on which to invent new forms of jouissance, which as you put it, are at once "self-deprecating, playful, funny, and profoundly ironic."
I'm in complete agreement with your point about learning to play in the ruins and to invent new forms of jouissance. A poem of mine, P(UN)K Poets: Too Fucked to Drink that was published about ten years ago (and debuted on stage at the 40th Anniversary of SF Punk Rock presented by the Punk Rock Sewing Circle) speaks directly to this, offering in its final lines a non-foundational call to action. You're spot on in portraying the subcultural moment in which your novel is set as our society's first encounter with the post-modern, and the inadequacy of the Beat path to that moment. This is the premise of the poem I mention, one I engage as well in a collection of fictive verse called La Commedia Sotterranea della Macchina da Scrivere. Truly a pleasure getting to know your work and to encounter a fellow writer whose experience resonates so strongly with my own.
Punk Rock Sewing Circle😂 I would love to read that poem. Is it in La Commedia? If not could you send it (dpolonoff@nyc.rr.com)? I too am very pleased at meeting you and the resonance!
It's not in La Commedia. It's in a book called the Underwater Typewriter. I'll send you a copy of that, along with a verse fragment on the UK-LA punk connection that's in the yet to be published second folio from the Typewriter Underground.
Great! Eager to see it.
PS I did an SF launch of my book last September at Winston Smith's Studio Fallout in North Beach (https://www.studiofallout.com). I see on IG that Winston is having a retrospective there on June 6. You may want to attend (assuming you are living in Bay Area),
I'm living down in Pacific Grove these days, but if I happen to be in town then. I'll check it out. Thanks for letting me know.
No prob.
Btw, in preparation for that prospective novel involving '80s NYC, I've been posting some of my pieces from that period on my substack @tropelessness in a section called Live From the 29th Century, which you might enjoy.
It's always good to get a new perspective on the beats. I missed the 70's,80's and 90's stoned and drunk/i was once a writer
I’m glad there were some reflective memories in the David Polonoff review. I think you would enjoy his book.
LOL!