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'The Last Avant-Garde: The Making Of The New York School Of Poets' by David Lehman

A new look at avant-garde New York poets

Thursday, October 29, 1998

By John Schulman

	The Last Avant-Garde: The Making Of The New York School Of Poets By David Lehman Doubleday $27.50

Nietzsche said that God is dead. The critic Arthur Danto said that Art bought the farm when Andy Warhol exhibited soup can paintings in 1963. But David Lehman thinks that poetry still has a chance. “The Last Avant-Garde” covers the years 1948-1966 in the lives of four poets to show how an avant-garde is concocted. The concluding chapters mull the question of whether an avant-garde is still possible.

John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch are four tremendously different poets. But they befriended each other in New York, partly the result of common backgrounds and interests: three of four went to Harvard, three of four were gay (if being gay is a social construct), and three of four were heavily influenced by the visual arts.

Lehman paints a superb picture of New York’s art scene in the late ’40s and early ’50s, centered socially around two bars, the Cedar Bar and the San Remo. At the Cedar, one could find Pollock, De Kooning, Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers, as well as assorted poets.

Naturally there was a lot of boozing, interspersed with acts of love, sex, betrayal, creativity, all accompanied by jazz, witty remarks and sparkling repartee. Lehman’s tone is slightly nostalgic, but he doesn’t indulge in too much gossip, as he’s eager to get on with four long essays on the poets.

Those readers who hope to gain insight into Ashbery’s allusive and elusive poems will likely be disappointed. Lehman does a masterful job in calling attention to some of the ways Ashbery’s poetry works, but never settles down to a close reading of any one poem, preferring instead to call this or that poem “great.”

He charts some of Ashbery’s influences, both in the arts and in literature, and recounts an amusing episode while interviewing the poet.

“ ‘How about the Surrealists?’ he asked. ‘Not the actual Surrealists,’ he said, ‘but hybrid ones like Reverdy and Max Jacob.’ “ When Lehman’s secretary typed it up, this is what it looked like:

Interviewer: How about Sir Realist?

Ashbery: Not the actual Sir Realist, but hybrid ones like the Reverend D. and Max Jack Hoe.

Lehman is much better with O’Hara, whose exuberant, sexy, gossipy poems are still remarkable for their brilliant modulations and wittiness.

“A lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible/disease but we don’t give her one we/don’t like terrible diseases,” goes one part of “Personal Poem.”

Lehman’s long readings of this poem and of “The Day Lady Died” seem just right.

He’s also adept in distinguishing the true seriousness and greatness at the heart of Koch, whose jokey poems have never received their due. And he’s best on the work of Schuyler, the most reclusive and vulnerable of the four, and whose work is the most unknown.

A question throughout the book is whether there was any New York School at all. Ashbery doesn’t think so:

“We were a bunch of poets who happened to know each other; we would get together and read our poems to each other, and sometimes we would write collaborations.”

Ashbery himself did not even live in New York during the crucial period; he was in Paris from 1958 to 1965.

Part of it was a matter of packaging. The hugely successful 1960 anthology, “The New American Poetry” lumped the four poets together under the New York School heading, to differentiate them from the Beats and others. The handle stuck.

Lehman’s book is packaged the same way. Boldface atop the jacket’s blurb is, “A landmark work of cultural history: the story of how four young poets reinvented literature and turned New York into the arts capital of the world.”

That’s a baldfaced lie. Lehman makes it clear that the poets had no programmatic agenda. Further, certain paintings and artists influenced the poets, but not the other way around. After Koch read his poems at a tavern, he asked Rothko what he thought, and Rothko was baffled by the poems.

Lehman concludes the book by speculating on what makes an avant-garde. There are four ingredients: Importance attached to the new, supplanting the old; the value placed on originality; the idea that destruction is essential for creation and that the future will be an advance on the past; and the artists’ adversarial instinct.

But Lehman says there’s something else, too: “I tend to Fairfield Porter’s view that there will always be an avant-garde ‘if we define the avant-garde as those people with the most energy.’” He goes on to cite several poets as well as the Language Poets who may be the flag-bearers of the next generation.

We might do well to ask Lehman whether any avant-garde is authentic once it’s appropriated by universities and by popular culture. Koch is a longtime professor at Columbia, Ashbery at Bard; O’Hara was, before his untimely death in 1966, a major curatorial figure at MOMA.

They wrote for popular journals, and some of their disputes with other poets were carried out in The New York Times.

Lehman never mentions what Clement Greenberg called “the golden umbilical chord” of money that connects so-called radical artists to the System. We would do well to ask Lehman, over a good French dinner, whether an avant-garde who summers in the Hamptons truly qualifies. And he would have an answer. And the conversation would go on.

John Schulman is co-owner of Caliban Bookshop in Oakland.