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


The New York Times Book Review, David Yezzi
Lehman ... has a spirited story to tell and he tells it with spirit.


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


Review
"[A] jaunty and readable account of artisitc friendship and collaboration in Manhattan in the 1950s and early '60s...Lehman tells this story with spirit." --The New York Times Book Review

"A highly readable and fittingly hybridized book: part cultural history, part speculative essay, part literary criticism, part biography...[Lehman] weaves narrative strands together with pertinent and lucid appreciation of the poetry." --The New York Observer

"Lehman skillfully waeves biographical sketches into his account of the poets' work and friendships...Makes a vivid, substantial constribution to our picture of New York in the '50s." --San Francisco Chronicle


Review
"[A] jaunty and readable account of artisitc friendship and collaboration in Manhattan in the 1950s and early '60s...Lehman tells this story with spirit." --The New York Times Book Review

"A highly readable and fittingly hybridized book: part cultural history, part speculative essay, part literary criticism, part biography...[Lehman] weaves narrative strands together with pertinent and lucid appreciation of the poetry." --The New York Observer

"Lehman skillfully waeves biographical sketches into his account of the poets' work and friendships...Makes a vivid, substantial constribution to our picture of New York in the '50s." --San Francisco Chronicle


Book Description
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.


From the Publisher
"[P]ertinent and lucid....a highly readable and fittingly hybridized book: part cultural history, part speculative essay, part literary criticism, part biography."
--Daniel Kunitz, The New York Observer


From the Inside Flap
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.


From the Back Cover
"[A] jaunty and readable account of artisitc friendship and collaboration in Manhattan in the 1950s and early '60s...Lehman tells this story with spirit." --The New York Times Book Review

"A highly readable and fittingly hybridized book: part cultural history, part speculative essay, part literary criticism, part biography...[Lehman] weaves narrative strands together with pertinent and lucid appreciation of the poetry." --The New York Observer

"Lehman skillfully waeves biographical sketches into his account of the poets' work and friendships...Makes a vivid, substantial constribution to our picture of New York in the '50s." --San Francisco Chronicle


About the Author
David Lehman is the author of Sign of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, several books of poetry, and is Series Editor of The Best American Poetry. His essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in all the major literary publications, from the Times Literary Supplement, to The New Yorker to The Paris Review. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institution of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.

"How do you know when a poem is finished?" someone once asked Frank O'Hara. His immediate, and now legendary, answer: "The telephone rings." That retort, undoubtedly issued along with a plume of cigarette smoke, may sound flippant, but it neatly illustrates the continuous relationship between self and art that characterized the work of the New York School of poets. As David Lehman points out in The Last Avant-Garde, the "school" -- which included John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch and O'Hara -- is aptly named because their poems, like the dripped- and splattered-on canvases of the New York School of painters, were arenas for action rather than representation. Here, for example, is an excerpt from O'Hara's breathless poem "Memorial Day, 1950": My mother and father asked me and I told them from my tight blue pants we should love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures. Wasted child! I'll club you on the shins! I wasn't surprised when the older people entered my cheap hotel room and broke my guitar and my can of blue paint. At that time all of us began to think with our bare hands and even with blood all over them, we knew vertical from horizontal, we never smeared anything except to find out how it lived.

Lehman argues that, because the New York School poets drew from the unbuttoned physicality of modern art (as opposed to Eastern mysticism), they may have more lasting impact than the other literary movements of the 1950s. The Beats may have "made more noise," Lehman writes, but they produced art with a less radical and less informed understanding of expression. The relationship between the two groups could get tense. Jack Kerouac heckled O'Hara during a 1959 reading, calling out, "You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara!" The poet shot back: "That's more than you ever did for it."

The New York School arrived at a perfect moment. The New Critics were lionizing logical and morally earnest "concerned citizen" poetry, and Lionel and Diana Trilling gave the establishment's sanction to only the most solemn new writers. By contrast, the four poets generated around their own bold, apolitical literary innovations an enthusiastically gay (in both senses of the word) atmosphere. They created numerous tandem compositions -- including plays, operas and illustrated chapbooks -- with the more coltish second generation New York School painters, Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher and Fairfield Porter. Lehman compellingly re-creates this energy; you can sense the breakneck wit that passed between any two of them.

In part two of his book, "The Ordeal of the Avant-Garde," Lehman abandons his sure narration for an equivocal kind of cultural criticism. He cobbles together a definition of the avant-garde and then challenges its characteristics as inherently contradictory: Can a movement encourage collaboration while still privileging "that insubordinate individual, 'the modern artist?'" Can it be adversarial but not produce political (and, so, one-dimensional) art? And -- apropos of the present-day poet's particular ordeal -- if art cannot at once be academic and avant-garde, how can an artist find that necessary resistance when "everything is instantly accepted, absorbed, glorified, bought, sold, copied, recycled, trashed?" These are good questions, even if Lehman is hardly the first to ask them. Too bad the answers he supplies are often less than conclusive.

The first half of The Last Avant-Garde is entertaining, however; it's certainly more habitable than City Poet, Brad Gooch's often myopic biography of O'Hara. (Lehman is well-positioned to write his version -- a former student of Koch's at Columbia and an accomplished poet himself, Lehman is the series editor of the annual Best of American Poetry volumes, and he functions as something of a poetry impresario in New York.) Lehman's formidable wit, and eye for details that recall an era that begrudged happiness and happenstance in its art, reminds us how necessary the New York School was -- and is. -- Salon

David Yezzi - New York Times Book Review

...[A] jaunty and readable account of artistic friendship and collaboration in Manhattan in the 1950s and early '60s....[The author] has a spirited story to tell, and he tells it with spirit.

Publishers Weekly

Through a careful balance of serious criticism and biographical sketch, Lehman (Signs of the Times) succeeds brilliantly in characterizing the lives and works of four poets--John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) and James Schuyler (1923-1991)--who defied the literary conventions of the '50s and '60s, and have gone on to produce some of the most significant 20th-century American poetry. After two chapters that set the scene--from intellectual comradeship at Harvard (all but Schuyler) to talking and drinking with the Abstract Expressionists at New York's Cedar Bar--Lehman devotes a chapter apiece to each poet. Whether evaluating Ashbery's and O'Hara's work (and their rival claims to rebelliousness), explaining the method behind Koch's madness or delving beneath Schuyler's seemingly simple surfaces, Lehman mixes biographical interest with careful, scholarly exegesis. Ashbery (Wakefulness; Forecasts, Mar. 30) comes off as the withdrawn genius of the group, while Lehman spends considerable energy combating the not wholly unjustified myth that has grown up around O'Hara's frenetical social life and accidental death. Though he can strain toward portent, as in his paean to Columbia professor Koch (Straits; Forecasts, Apr. 27), Lehman is delicate in his appreciations, especially of Schuyler. The last section, with its dubious pronouncement that an avant-garde is no longer possible, seems tacked on, and while one might further quibble about Lehman's reduction of a rich, varied tradition to the work of four men, his clarity and earnest enthusiasm will entice readers to both his subjects and their absent partners in literary crime.

Library Journal

Lehman (series editor, "The Best American Poetry") combines biography, cultural history, and literary analysis to reveal the identity, aesthetic, and friendships of a group of four artists from 1948 to 1966. Quick to establish the atmosphere of collaboration, spirit of competition, and sense of common cause that would fragment into a literary collegiality, Lehman carefully profiles poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler and compares his New York subjects with the earlier Paris avant-garde. The last chapters, given to an aesthetic analysis of avant-garde movements, culminate with a glimpse at some of the generational offspring of the New York School. Lehman's well-written, warm, good-humored text (which has just the right edge for his topic) is both thorough and accessible. -- Scott Hightower, NYU/Gallatin, New York Read all 9 "From The Critics" >

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