dps, the next avant-garde movement

For my poetry class we've been reading "The Last Avant-Garde, The Making of the New York School of Poets" by David Lehman. You should all read it, fabulous book, really. And if not, at least go read poems by these guys: Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, Kenneth Koch & James Schuyler. Basically they were just four guys in the early 1900's who loved art. And art was centered around NYC at the time. Other than that, they had little to do with New York, and didn't set out to create any sort of literary movement. They wrote poems. They were inspired by art and by one another. They collaborated. They kept in touch when they were scattered about the world. And above all, they were friends.

I laughed my way through the first few chapters of this book, it reminded me so much of this little group of poets from Hope College. :)

And a little quote from the book that made me smile in particular. The epigraph to chapter 2, titled "the band of rivals":

"Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down
Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes,
sometimes
Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step . . ."
-W.H. Auden-