Content area
Full text
The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. By David Lehman. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Pp. 433. $27.50.
The Daily Mirror: A journal in Poetry. By David Lehman. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2000. Pp. 160. $16.
In his preface to From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 19451965, James E. B. Breslin recalls his failed attempt to dismiss Frank O'Hara's "A Step Away from Them" as "a bit of charming triviality." It was 1959, and Breslin, like most other readers of contemporary poems, had come to expect from them features such as "mythical resonance, literary allusion, paradox, irony, tension" and the rest of the "certain certainties of critical discourse in the fifties"-none of which seemed to characterize O'Hara's lines. "It was not," writes Breslin, "that 'A Step Away from Them' was a bad poem; it was no poem." And yet, though he was unable to articulate what, exactly, O'Hara had accomplished, Breslin found that "O'Hara's poem stuck in my mind; it was a poem." Breslin's book began with his effort to take that was out of italics, to come to terms with a new kind of aesthetic experience.
Forty years later, the kind of writing that intrigued Breslin no longer seems experimental. The central figures of what came to be known as the New York School of Poetry-O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery-went on to win the most prestigious literary awards in the United States, and they continue to exert a considerable influence over many of their younger contemporaries. Indeed, Ashbery is arguably the dominant American poet of the last 25 years.
I am not suggesting, of course, that these poets, least of all Ashbery, no longer provoke controversy. A few years ago I somewhat jokingly asked a well-known poet who his least favorite writer was. "Ashbery," he answered (without pausing to consider other possible candidates), and he went on to explain why he thought Ashbery's influence has been disastrous. Nor, as David Lehman knows, is it uncommon to meet serious poetry readers who have simply given up trying to appreciate Ashbery, and who may not consider Koch or Schuyler or O'Hara worthy of their attention. For such readers, Lehman has written a valuable book, one both entertaining and highly...