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

David Lehman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 9, 1999

A landmark work of cultural history--now in paperback--by one of our best critics and chroniclers: the story of how four young poets reinvented literature and turned New York into the art capital of the world.

Greenwich Village, New York, circa 1951. Every night, at a rundown tavern with a magnificent bar called the Cedar Tavern, an extraordinary group or painters, writers, poets, and hangers-on arrive to drink, argue, tell jokes, fight, start affairs, and bang out a powerful new aesthetic. Their style is playful, irreverent, tradition-shattering, and brilliant. Out of these friendships, and these conversations, will come the works of art and poetry that will define New York City as the capital of world culture--abstract expressionism and the New York School of Poetry.

A richly detailed portrait of one of the great movements in American arts and letters, The Last Avant-Garde covers the years 1948-1966 and focuses on four fast friends--the poets Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Lehman brings to vivid life the extraordinary creative ferment of the time and place, the relationship of great friendship to art, and the powerful influence that a group of visual artisits--especially Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter--had on the literary efforts of the New York School.

The Last Avant-Garde is both a definitive and lively view of a quintessentially American aesthetic and an exploration of the dynamics of creativity.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Anyone who thinks that avant-garde movements can flourish only in Left Bank cafés would do well to read David Lehman's superb new book. Lehman, an editor, essayist, and poet, zeroes in on four extraordinary poets--John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler--who were friends, rivals, sometime collaborators, and passionate appreciators of each other's work from the late 1940s through the mid 1960s. This "remarkable gang of four" was, in Lehman's opinion, not only a true avant-garde--collective creators of new, subversive, nonmainstream art--but also "the last authentic avant-garde movement that we have had in American poetry." It's an ambitious thesis, but Lehman pulls it off in a narrative compounded of cultural history, biography, literary analysis, and great gossip.

Most fascinating are Lehman's insights into the inspiration that the poets found in the lives and works of contemporary painters--waggering abstract expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the gentler figurative painters Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, and Jane Freilicher, who came after them. As Ashbery put it, "The artists liked us and bought us drinks and we ... felt that they ... were free to be free in their painting in a way that most people felt was impossible for poetry." But each poet made it possible in his own way--Ashbery through surreal word collages, Koch through the pursuit of happiness in verse, O'Hara in witty telephonic stream of consciousness, and Schuyler by treating his feelings as objects. Lehman calls his book a study of "the bliss of being alive and young at a moment of maximum creative ferment," and that bliss fairly shimmers on the page. The Last Avant-Garde, a remarkable hybrid, succeeds in being both critically acute and luminously exciting. --David Laskin --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

The overseeing editor of the annual Best American Poetry regards four poets who were young together in New York in the 1950s and whose verbal experimentation was inspired by the abstract expressionist painters of the just-previous generation as the last revolutionaries in U.S. literature. In the big first part of his splendidly lucid, keenly sympathetic book (this is how to write about poetry), Lehman profiles and analyzes the four--John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler--and their context. In the second, he discusses what an avant-garde is, how the New York quartet constituted one, and, without delving too much into the reasons, why they were the last avant-garde. Lehman basically sees the four as new Romantics, determined to again integrate the hoi polloi into literature as Wordsworth had and, like the earlier twentieth-century avant-gardist William Carlos Williams, to use life as they lived it and language as they spoke it to revitalize poetry--to, as Pound challenged, "make it new." Superb popular cultural history. Ray Olson --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (November 9, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385495331
• ISBN-13: 978-0385495332
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.2 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #851,515 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars a breath of fresh air... December 28, 1999

By J.Leigh Welteroth, English student

Format:Paperback

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Draw a Draft at 'the Five Spot' May 23, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

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!!

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Our "Season on Earth" November 14, 2002

By Jordan Manley

Format:Paperback

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.