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

Rating:
Summary: The Last Best Thing (and Next)
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: a breath of fresh air...
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Lehman's New York School for Dummies
Review: Providing a broad cultural context for the poets he emphasizes (Ashbery, O'Hara, Koch, and Schuyler), Lehman's study weaves together social history, personal biography, literary criticism, and aesthetic appreciation in a work that offers some insightful readings of specific poems, but the lasting contribution of which is more likely to be for the social connections Lehman's draws between this tight-knit group of "playfully serious aesthetes" than for any specific argument the book advances. He describes Ashbery as a poet of obliquity, for whom "the subject of ... poetry is consciousness," and for whom "consciousness is his self, but a self that is inseparable from the rush of phenomenon that bombards it on all sides." O'Hara is described as the social catalyst of the group and quintessential poet of the everyday, whose work, by reorienting criteria for poetic success away from sincerity, profundity, and depth and toward humor, play, and respect for the quotidian, established an influential new poetic paradigm. In his least insightful chapter, Lehman defends the "critically undervalued" Koch as a "serious comic poet," influenced by drama and writing in the tradition of Rabelais, Byron, Lewis Carroll, and Oscar Wilde; and Schuyler Lehman emphasizes as a more austere and minimal poet of "life outside his window," who "revised the lyric model of the poem as found in Whitman, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams." None of this is particularly startling to readers at all familiar with their work, but as a friend and co-conspirator of most of the poets he discusses, Lehman capitalizes well on his large store of anecdotes and offers hitherto unrecorded biographical details that will likely fuel biographical debates for many years. Unfortunately, his overall thesis-that the New York School of Poets constitutes "the avant-garde-the last avant-garde in American poetry" is supported mostly by impressionistic commentary and mere lists of more recent poets influenced by New York School aesthetics.