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Title: The Last Avant-Garde : The Making of the New York School of Poets by David Lehman ISBN: 0-385-49533-1 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 09 November, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.71 (14 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Beautiful writing, beautiful subject, but . . .
Comment: Specialists on any of Lehman's major figures will find little here that they don't already know. Serious literary scholars will find Lehman's scanty second section, "The Ordeal of the Avant-Garde," thin gruel indeed. Lehman is a fluent, sensitive reader, but his concern to protect the NY schoolers from insufficiently appreciative criticism is, well, boring--something Ashbery, O'Hara, Koch, and Schuyler rarely are. And his theoretical ideas about the avant-garde are muddled at best. So, who should read this book? Serious high school and college students with venturesome tastes should, by all means, consume it. But they should quickly move on to Marjorie Perloff, John Shoptaw, etc. Ph.D. candidates desperate for thesis ideas would find their time with Lehman well-repaid as he liberally sprinkles his text with "someone should do a study of . . ."-isms, and he's right: somebody should. Others will have a great time, but an hour after they finish they'll be hungry again.
Rating: 4
Summary: Our "Season on Earth"
Comment: This bio-philisophical account is a compendium of half the origin of post-modern philosophy and procedure in art. It is admittedly vague when it comes to the Beats, the second half, but the Academics are well introduced and begin to be explained. It is better read as an introduction to post-modern alacrity than a biography. This book should be the post-modern art-history text of highschool and university classrooms. And why? What is more galvanizing than a story of four young poets who fought in a war, attended ivy league schools, lived la vie boheme, and made a literary contribution to the world? We have lost these role models today. We have celebrities that live recklessly and leave feckless leagacys behind them. We also have stiff academics who have forgotten the pleasures of life some where between Dante and Wilbur. The Last Avant-Garde is a perfect demonstration of how our "season on earth" can be both meaningful and well-lived.
Rating: 3
Summary: Lehman's New York School for Dummies
Comment: 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.
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Title: The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara by Frank O'Hara, Donald Merriam Allen, Allen Donald ISBN: 0520201663 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: March, 1995 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 by Donald Merriam Allen ISBN: 0520209532 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: July, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters by Marjorie Perloff ISBN: 0226660591 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: December, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, Includes 35-track CD of audio clips of poetry readings by Daniel Kane ISBN: 0520233859 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 15 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara: A Memoir by Joe LeSueur ISBN: 0374139806 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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