The Last Avant-Garde: The Making
of the New York School of Poets, by David Lehman
Doubleday, 1998
I'm not usually one to read non-fiction, especially biography. So when I say I really enjoyed reading David Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde, that's really saying something.
Lehman, who is the editor of the Best American Poetry series, looks closely at the four founding members of the New York School of poetry: John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. The book first describes the birth of the "New York School" movement, the rebelling against didactic, boring, purely academic poetry.
Lehman then turns his focus on each of the above-mentioned poets, in turn detailing their lives leading up to and following their rise to fame. He evokes each one's personality, their idiosyncrasies, their jealousies and friendships.
What I enjoyed most, was the history of the visual art world of that time, and Lehman's adept linking of the movements of the worlds of literary, musical and visual arts the musicians, artists, and writers who influenced not only each other, but those that would follow them.
Lehman's non-chronological and loosely organized text doesn't detract from the book's historical accuracy or literary enjoyability. Instead, the free movement of the biographical sketches within the writers' lives serves more to give an overview of each individual as well as the New York School itself. The whole is shown truly as a sum of its parts, but in the end, it never really mattered what order the parts fell in, only that they were all there in the end.
