Send in the Clowns, They're Already Here

Abstract

Explicit through the interlocking sinews of David Lehman's new biographi cal/theoretical homage, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, the practiced muscular definition of all potent avant-garde movement is repeatedly flexed: newness over novelty, originality over mime sis, change over stasis, and combativeness over docility. Like a knot of inge nious circus clowns locking the gaze of spectacle-hungry crowds, the avant garde must always augment definition with showmanship, keep politics from tripping aesthetic stilts, stop compact cars from blurring each harlequin into the larger, comic mass, and perhaps most tellingly, juggle a plentitude of unevenly weighted objects in the air, ostentatiously manipulating the forces of resistance. Eventually, the next act will charge the spotlight with equally fantastic flourishes?frenzied lions intent on the kill, trapeze artists whirling in the thick air, motorcycle daredevils revving across tightropes?and the no longer provocative avant-garde will be forced to drop its metaphoric balls. According to Lehman, the New York School avant-garde, a loose con tinuum of even more loosely associated poets, mingling in weaves of loose, mutual appreciation societies with Abstract Expressionist painters (Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, et al. .. .), lets loose its meta-linguistic loop-de-loops and anti-establishment ara besques through the antics of four very different performer-poets. Biographi cal vignettes of the New York School principals?Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler?characterize The Last Avant-Garde like four different gem-cuts decorating the same stone. Through a prolonged meditation on the viability of a retrospective avant-garde appraisal for the New York School, Lehman entices the reader with a plan for assembling facets, a glimpse at microscopic patterns, and a call to enter the poetic mines. Enthusiastic throughout, The Last Avant-Garde attempts the hat-trick of biography, textual analysis, and cultural criticism to proffer a thesis mingling the disparate strands of a bygone American era: that the first virile generation