What The Last Avant-Garde actually says.

"The story of the New York School of poets is a study in friendship, artistic collaboration, and the bliss of being alive and young and a moment of maximum creative ferment. It is also the story of the last authentic avant-garde movement that we have had in American poetry."



[And]



"In the second half of this book, I raise the question of whether the avant-garde as an abstract concept or a practical idea is finished. It is a question that leads to others, or requires the answer to others, before it can be settled. What does (or did) avant-garde mean, and how did it come to have that meaning? What exactly are the requirements of an avant-garde movement? What lessons do the movements of the past have to teach us? The argument against the viability of the avant-garde today rests on the assumption that there is no real resistance to the new, no stable form from which the defiant artist may depart. While I find this to be a convincing argument, I would sooner help quicken a new avant-garde than pronounce the demise of an old one. In any event, my book means to stand or fall not on speculation regarding the future of the avant-garde but on the job it does of presenting four major poets, defining their importance, examining the way their friendships entered their art, and depicting the milieu in which they lived and worked."



[And]



"It might be thought that in the course of this book I have made, or repeated, a convincing argument that the avant-garde is finished as a vital concept or ideal capable of stimulating new art into existence. But if as O'Hara once remarked, 'the avant-garde always exists in the state of idea,' there may still be hope for it. 'The avant-garde has been made up, I think, completely, and through all history, with people who are bored by other people's ideas,' O'Hara said. 'Now, you do not have to have the Russian Revolution or the French Revolution or the Civil Rights Movement in order to get irritated by other people's ideas. All you have to do is be one individual who is tired of looking at something that looks like something else.' This book is dedicated to that one individual."



[Just the handiest examples. All the other words in the book are useful too.]