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

by David Lehman

Book Overview

A landmark work of cultural history that tells the story of how four young poets, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, 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,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385495331
• ISBN13: 9780385495332
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The Last Best Thing (and Next)

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.

Terrific Writing on a Fascinating Quartet of Poets

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.

Draw a Draft at 'the Five Spot'

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!!

This book is a dream.

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.

Very hip, evocative, cultural history made sexy

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.