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We are coming to the end of a period in which several generations of poets
in America, Australia and Great Britain have found the work of John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch,
Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler more inspiring than that of Auden, Eliot, Lowell and
Pound. For example, when the Australian poet Ken Bolton begins his poem (My List
Begins) Joe Turner:
It is terrific
to be on your feet
in the
Forest Lodge, coming in the door
I don't
know what time it is
but not late and I am
there
It seems as if there could never have been any doubt that writing is deeply embedded in
the fabric of everyday living. It seems appropriate, then, that David Lehman's study of
the New York school, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of
Poets, should appear now to remind us that this was not always the case. The
story goes that you could 'join' the New York school by giving $20 to Ted Berrigan. For an
extra $7.50, Lehman's book doesn't 'get you in,' but it goes a long way toward explaining
why so many poets are still writing themselves onto a posthumous guest list. Lehman gives
sensitive and persuasive accounts of the poetry and the reasons for its appeal as well as
what might be termed the 'group dynamics' of the New York poets: "Writing about this
quartet of poets, one is struck by how often a useful generalization fits three of the
four principals, with O'Hara the one constant in all." Lehman draws a convincing
picture of the poets' social milieu and of the wider cultural and political background to
their poetry: the rise of Abstract Expressionism, the dominance of the New Critics, the
Eisenhower era. He has known or worked with most of the people he writes about and has
interviewed many others. He makes judicious use of correspondence, reviews, newspaper
articles, and most notably, John Ashbery's personal archives now in the Houghton Library
at Harvard. His tone throughout is celebratory and upbeat, and his study complements and,
to some extent redresses, both the post-AIDS gloominess of Brad Gooch's well-researched City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara and the
theoretical emphasis of Geoff Ward's ground-breaking Statutes
of Liberty.
The Last Avant-Garde is welcome, timely and eminently readable.
Lehman's enthusiasm is engaging and prompts further reflection on some of the more
intriguing aspects of New York school poetry. As Lehman acknowledges in a lengthy
discussion in Part II, the whole conception of avant-garde art has become extremely
problematic. Indeed, it could be argued that Abstract Expressionism—not Pop
Art—marks the point at which the avant-garde becomes assimilated and fully
commodified and that O'Hara was deeply implicated in the process. While it is perfectly
possible to argue, as Lehman does, that 'the New York poets were aesthetes in revolt
against a moralist's universe' (358), it now seems clear that this revolt was of a limited
nature. Lehman's equally valuable observation that the New York poets believed in
'identifying the reader's pleasure with the author's happiness' suggests that the
undiminished influence of the New York poets can be traced in part to their extremely
user-friendly prosody. New York poetry is easy to consume. It's not surprising to find
that the personae presented in the work of Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara and Schuyler are in many
ways conspicuous consumers. Their poetry is full of products and the enjoyment of those
products. It has often been remarked that O'Hara portrays himself as a late
twentieth-century fl�neur but he is also a shopper par excellence. Many of his most
enduring poems feature the poet in the act of shopping, about to shop or just having
shopped. If New York poetry rejects metaphysical speculation or confessional angst, it
replaces them with unashamed enjoyment of the material world. In this sense, Ashbery's
'perpetual motion' discourse and O'Hara's restless circumambulations of Manhattan both
figure the free-floating, ever-aroused, never satisfied desire of capitalism. The one uses
language with 'no obligation to buy' any one particular mode, just as the other shops for
Picayunes and le cadeau juste. This may go a long way to explaining, albeit rather
uncomfortably, why New York poetry was so influential in the period of Thatcherism and
Reaganomics, which was the age of designer labels and over-engineered adult toys such as
Phillipe Starck juicers. It may also be the inevitable element of risk in a poetry which
does not think that poetry is 'above' or better than life.
The intriguingly incomplete fit between a portrayal of the New York poets as
avant-garde resisters of bourgeois norms and the actualities of their practice and
influence is even more visible in the area of poetics and sexual politics. Ashbery, O'Hara
and Schuyler are—or were—gay, and yet their most enduring influence has been on
largely straight male poets. Of course, Ashbery makes no overt references to his
homosexuality and references by O'Hara and Schuyler are casual and unpoliticized and this
makes this aspect of their work easy to dismiss or ignore. However, when one considers
that, as Geoff Ward points out in Statutes
of Liberty, male involvement in poetry in twentieth century capitalist
societies has been surrounded by clearly articulated anxieties about effeminacy and, quite
specifically, sissyness, then their appeal and influence becomes all the more remarkable.
As I noted above, O'Hara is always going shopping which is something that many straight
men traditionally shun. Similarly, when Schuyler, in 'A Few Days', tells us how he wastes
money on flowers and spends part of the poem using a whole bottle of expensive cologne,
this opens questions of the relationship between a gender and its permitted voices. As
Schuyler's poetic self transcends taboos about behavior, so does the poetry transcend
taboos about vocabulary and subject. What New York school poetry exemplifies, is a
defining lack of embarrassment about being a man, being engaged by cultural products, and
writing poetry. Its legacy—for male poets—is to demonstrate a way of writing
that is unafraid of being true to the complexities of the self in poetry. It is a way of
writing that is not hung up on either the idea that poetry must be equated with physical
labor, or that the only alternatives to that conception are self-conscious romanticism or
hard-boiled, laconic detachment. It is way of portraying the observing self in the midst
of everyday reality that is neither the snapshots of social realism, or the poet with his
nose pressed up against the windows of other peoples' lives. It is not just an enactment
of the fact that poetry is a particular way of behaving in language but an inspiring
suggestion that poetry may in fact be a particular form of social behavior. Its ultimate
legacy is that the decision to write poetry is inextricable from the decision to live
one's life in a particular way and that the foundation of this is the acceptance, in
O'Hara's words, "that everything is all right and difficult."
___
Readers may also find the following of interest: Chris Greenhalgh's Towards a
Postmodern Urban Poetic: The Poetry of Frank O'Hara, Verse Vol 9 No 3 (Winter
1992), 75-86; and my own Four Windows on James Schuyler, Verse Vol 10 No 2
(Summer 1993), 70-75.
David Kennedy was born in Leicester, England in 1959. He
co-edited The New Poetry (Bloodaxe Books 1993), and is the author
of New Relations: The Refashioning Of British Poetry 1980-1994
(Seren 1996). A selection of translations from Max Jacob’s surrealist classic Le Cornet � D�s (The Dice Cup), in collaboration with
Christopher Pilling, is forthcoming from Atlas later this year. He lives in
Sheffield.
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