Customer Reviews

The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Lehman's presentation of the New York School is accurate (he lived it) and equally fascinating. The book is a breath of fresh air to modern literary criticism. Drawing on many aspects of the Avant Garde movement, and the influences of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and even the activities of the Beat Generation, Lehman presents not only the lives and writings of these poets, but draws the reader into the atmosphere of the times, making the book a pleasure to read. I chose this book to accompany a college honors project and I would recommend it especially for anyone teaching a class in the Avant Garde literary movement.

The chapter on Ashbery was so impressive that I just ordered "The Tennis Court Oath" and "The Skaters" as well.

This bio-philisophical account is a compendium of half the origin of post-modern philosophy and procedure in art. It is admittedly vague when it comes to the Beats, the second half, but the Academics are well introduced and begin to be explained. It is better read as an introduction to post-modern alacrity than a biography. This book should be the post-modern art-history text of highschool and university classrooms. And why? What is more galvanizing than a story of four young poets who fought in a war, attended ivy league schools, lived la vie boheme, and made a literary contribution to the world? We have lost these role models today. We have celebrities that live recklessly and leave feckless leagacys behind them. We also have stiff academics who have forgotten the pleasures of life some where between Dante and Wilbur. The Last Avant-Garde is a perfect demonstration of how our "season on earth" can be both meaningful and well-lived.

Dave Lehman's prose courses like water.. or maybe good whiskey, (off)Beat? poetry and good friends.. in smoky, seedy bars rushing with youthful exuberance.. Lower Manhattan, circa 1952. I read Tom Wolfe's 'the Painted Word' recently. This delightful lampoon of the New York Art 'Schools' of the same period, hanging out with the same crowd, had made me wary of the posturing and promotion which has characterized the industry of trendy art in Gotham. This book is a good antidote for Wolfe's biting satire. It is a scholarly and critical meditation on the nature and role of poetry and the poet at a time when the world at large has little time and patience for them. It does not preach or pander. Lehman's is an intelligent and engaging study of structure, meaning and motivation of this very low payed profession.

What makes the New York School a real avant-garde or unique from the Beats, for example, is still a mystery to me. The latter schism seems to have been well established, though, by the time of a drunken confrontation between Kerouak, Ginsberg and the NYS at a poetry reading in 1959; when they squared off and accused each other of ruining American poetry. There are all kinds of nifty anecdotes in the book. Some of the poems are lovely or funny or profound.. even to the neophyte.. others impenetrable. At the very least soak up the atmosphere.. good times, alcohol, experimental jazz, hipster jive, abstract expressionism, various varieties of sex.. and most of all friendship is what 'school' seems to have been about. .. Fine Book!!

Disregard carping snob academics. This book is the real goods. Lehman probably writes better, more clearly and more passionately, than anyone else writing on American poetry today. The biographical research on Ashbery is so good it masde me pick up Boswell's Johnson one day and Ashbery's "The Skaters" the next. I am not sure how I stand on the theoretical issues raised: questions such as how viable is an avant-garde today can be argued and argued to little gain. What is most worthwhile in this book is the solid, rich introduction to the poetry of James Schuyler (a personal favorite), Frank O'Hara, the underrated Kenneth Koch, and the ever enigmatic Ashbery. Highly recommended.

An amazing book, "The Last Avant-Garde" taught me a lot about the poets, their friends, the whole milieu, in prose so clear and clean you can't believe you're reading literary criticism. I bet I'm not the only reader who comes away thinking that Ashbery and O'Hara and Schuyler and Koch could be the subject of a pretty great movie.

This book is a must if you like poetry, Greenwich Village. romance, bars, th 1940s, the 1950s, painting, panting, jazz, grass, the whole New York trip. Especially art -- art as savage as a lion in the living room or a tiger on the fire escape. The four poets at the center of this maelstrom were John Ashberg, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler,and Lehman writes about each of them singly and as a group. I recommend this book highly -- it's amazing, an erudite and sophisticated work that reads like a page turner. I didn't want it to end.

You just can't put it down simply because you can't have enough of the drama and color of a period when poetry walked barefoot with a hard-on. One really feels like taking the next flight to The Big Apple and hunkering down to a cold pint and cigarettes in a dive with the windows steamed over with blue smoke. Today's poetic scenario stops looking like a dry dog turd on the road; possibilities heat up in you, hands seeking the comfort of paint squeezed from a tube.You feel like painting, writing, sculpting, even turning gay ALL IN THE SAME DAMNED SITTING (no pun intended); you feel like living the dream. And that's what books and poetry are all about. Buy this book if you want a miracle--it gave me strength in a period when everyting hurt.

Specialists on any of Lehman's major figures will find little here that they don't already know. Serious literary scholars will find Lehman's scanty second section, "The Ordeal of the Avant-Garde," thin gruel indeed. Lehman is a fluent, sensitive reader, but his concern to protect the NY schoolers from insufficiently appreciative criticism is, well, boring--something Ashbery, O'Hara, Koch, and Schuyler rarely are. And his theoretical ideas about the avant-garde are muddled at best. So, who should read this book? Serious high school and college students with venturesome tastes should, by all means, consume it. But they should quickly move on to Marjorie Perloff, John Shoptaw, etc. Ph.D. candidates desperate for thesis ideas would find their time with Lehman well-repaid as he liberally sprinkles his text with "someone should do a study of . . ."-isms, and he's right: somebody should. Others will have a great time, but an hour after they finish they'll be hungry again.

This book gives us the knowledge of poets and the culture of the time they represented. This book is an amazzsing one.

This book is fine, it's OK, it's not bad. But there's nothing new here. It's not satisfying as biography -- what we gets feels like tiny fragments -- and the critical argument of the book isn't of much interest. The fact that the author essentially disregards the worth of almost all great 20th century poetry not written by the four men that he chooses to focus on is a huge misstep; he could have easily acknowledged the worth of Barbara Guest, the Language poets, Black Mountain, the Beats, etc. but instead either damns them with faint praise or simply damns them, apparently to make his case for the four New York Schoolers stronger. These are four very important poets, yes, but the author seems to be unable to view them in the greater poetic context of the last 100 years, and this puts the book at a serious disadvantage; it may undermine the reader's belief in him as a critic, and it made me, for one, unwilling to follow him down the rather uninteresting critical paths he was mapping out. The quest to determine what is and is not "avant garde" feels misguided and beside the point; how about actually reading the work in a new or compelling way?