F E A T U R E Across the great divide By Gary Kamiya If government programs can't solve America's racial dilemma, can love? Three new books take a fresh look at the ongoing challenge of black-and-white integration T A B L E+T A L K Hooked on James Ellroy? Discuss the author and his work in Table Talk's Books area B O O K C A S E A new service for book lovers R E C E N T L Y Blindness By José Saramago Fiction (10/16/98) The Rum Diary By Hunter S. Thompson Fiction (10/15/98) God of the Rodeo By Daniel Bergner Nonfiction (10/14/98) Armadillo By William Boyd Fiction (10/13/98) Family Outing By Chastity Bono Nonfiction (10/12/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T H E+G A R N E R R E P O R T The Garner Report By Dwight Garner A highly subjective, monthly roundup of upcoming book titles S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		------ T  h  e   l  a  s  t   a  v  a  n  t  -  g  a  r  d  e   .   . The Making of the New York School of Poets DAVID LEHMAN DOUBLEDAY NONFICTION 433 PAGES BY BRIAN BLANCHFIELD | "How do you know when a poem is finished?" someone once asked Frank O'Hara. His immediate, and now legendary, answer: "The telephone rings." That retort, undoubtedly issued along with a plume of cigarette smoke, may sound flippant, but it neatly illustrates the continuous relationship between self and art that characterized the work of the New York School of poets. As David Lehman points out in "The Last Avant-Garde," the "school" -- which included John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch and O'Hara -- is aptly named because their poems, like the dripped- and splattered-on canvases of the New York School of painters, were arenas for action rather than representation. Here, for example, is an excerpt from O'Hara's breathless poem "Memorial Day, 1950": My mother and father asked me and I told them from my tight blue pants we should love only the stones, the sea, and heroic figures. Wasted child! I'll club you on the shins! I wasn't surprised when the older people entered my cheap hotel room and broke my guitar and my can of blue paint. At that time all of us began to think with our bare hands and even with blood all over them, we knew vertical from horizontal, we never smeared anything except to find out how it lived. Lehman argues that, because the New York School poets drew from the unbuttoned physicality of modern art (as opposed to Eastern mysticism), they may have more lasting impact than the other literary movements of the 1950s. The Beats may have "made more noise," Lehman writes, but they produced art with a less radical and less informed understanding of expression. The relationship between the two groups could get tense. Jack Kerouac heckled O'Hara during a 1959 reading, calling out, "You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara!" The poet shot back: "That's more than you ever did for it." The New York School arrived at a perfect moment. The New Critics were lionizing logical and morally earnest "concerned citizen" poetry, and Lionel and Diana Trilling gave the establishment's sanction to only the most solemn new writers. By contrast, the four poets generated around their own bold, apolitical literary innovations an enthusiastically gay (in both senses of the word) atmosphere. They created numerous tandem compositions -- including plays, operas and illustrated chapbooks -- with the more coltish second generation New York School painters, Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher and Fairfield Porter. Lehman compellingly re-creates this energy; you can sense the breakneck wit that passed between any two of them. In part two of his book, "The Ordeal of the Avant-Garde," Lehman abandons his sure narration for an equivocal kind of cultural criticism. He cobbles together a definition of the avant-garde and then challenges its characteristics as inherently contradictory: Can a movement encourage collaboration while still privileging "that insubordinate individual, 'the modern artist?'" Can it be adversarial but not produce political (and, so, one-dimensional) art? And -- apropos of the present-day poet's particular ordeal -- if art cannot at once be academic and avant-garde, how can an artist find that necessary resistance when "everything is instantly accepted, absorbed, glorified, bought, sold, copied, recycled, trashed?" These are good questions, even if Lehman is hardly the first to ask them. Too bad the answers he supplies are often less than conclusive. The first half of "The Last Avant-Garde" is entertaining, however; it's certainly more habitable than "City Poet," Brad Gooch's often myopic biography of O'Hara. (Lehman is well-positioned to write his version -- a former student of Koch's at Columbia and an accomplished poet himself, Lehman is the series editor of the annual "Best of American Poetry" volumes, and he functions as something of a poetry impresario in New York.) Lehman's formidable wit, and eye for details that recall an era that begrudged happiness and happenstance in its art, reminds us how necessary the New York School was -- and is. SALON | Oct. 19, 1998 Brian Blanchfield is a writer living in Brooklyn.