"FICTION, ESSAYS, POETRY, POLITICS, ART from FLASHPOINT"

     Paintings & Prints

     Poetry & Prose

     Virtual Facsimiles

Founding Editors:
Joe Brennan
Carlo Parcelli

Contributing Editors:
Bradford Haas
Rosalie Gancie
Cathy Muse
Mark Scroggins
Jim Angelo

Web Editors:
JR Foley
Rosalie Gancie
Nicole Foley

III. Andante Sostenuto They tell us to forget the Golgotha we tread... We who are scourged with hate, A price upon our head. They who have shackled us. Require of us a song, They who have wasted us Bid us condone the wrong. They tell us to forget Democracy is spurned. They tell us to forget The Bill of Rights is burned. Three Hundred years we slaved, We slave and suffer yet: Thought flesh and bone rebel, They tell us to forget! Oh, how can we forget Our human rights denied Oh, how can we forget Our manhood crucified? When justice is profaned And plea with curse is met, When freedom's gates are barred, Oh, how can we forget?

– Melvin B. Tolson

a selection from:

Rendezvous with America

All essays, poetry, fiction, and artwork are copyrighted in the
names of the authors and artists,
to whom all rights revert.

Issue Index

David Jones Conference

March 29 & 30, 2012

J.R. Foley

Country Valley Press

   Carlo Parcelli:

Book
/

Author page

   Wayne Pounds

Book / Author page

   Eric Rosenbloom

intro

____________________

Robert M. Farnsworth

Melvin B. Tolson Revisited

Grant Jenkins

Melvin B. Tolson’s

Ethical Experiment

and

The Philosophy of Otherness

Tyrone Williams

The Pan-African-Americanism

of Melvin B. Tolson

Aldon Nielsen

Tolson’s Turn

Kathy Lou Schultz

To Save and Destroy:

Melvin B. Tolson,

Langston Hughes,

and Theories of the Archive

Jon Woodson

Reading

Melvin B. Tolson’s

Harlem Gallery:

Alchemy, Codes, and the

Key to the Secret of Life

and

Melvin B. Tolson

and Oragean Modernism:

a few notes on

The Problem of Esoteric Writers

in American Literature

Melvin B. Tolson

Reading from

Dark Symphony

along with Dark Symphony

from the Atlantic Monthly

and

Ex-Judge at the Bar

from Negro Digest October 1965

Karl Shapiro discusses

The Poet Who Writes in ‘Negro’

Down With ‘The Tradition’

Decolonization of American Literature

and from

Negro Digest May 1965

A Curtain Raised

Melvin B. Tolson,

Poet

from Negro Digest

December 1966

Sarah Webster Fabio

Who Speaks Negro?

A Poet’s Reply to Karl Shapiro

from the archive:

Letters:

Melvin B. Tolson

and

Kate and Benjamin Bell

musical composition

T.J. Anderson:

Variations on a Theme

by M. B. Tolson

Carlo Parcelli

Workingman’s Tolson

a reminiscence

and

David Jones’ ‘The Sleeping Lord’,

Melvin Tolson’s ‘Libretto for the Republic of Liberia’

and American Empire

from The Crisis:

Hobart Jarrett

Adventures in

Interracial

Debates

from Negro Digest Jan 1966:

Dudley Randall

on Melvin B. Tolson

Portrait of a Poet
as Raconteur

from the archive:

Melvin B. Tolson

The Sea-Turtle and the Shark

Anne M. Cooke

The Little Theatre Movement

as an Adult Education Project

Among Negroes

Photos and Clippings

Langston Hughes on Race and Tolson

Tolson on Race and Class

Tolson with Shapiro, Kendrix, Hillyard Robinson

M.B. Tolson

Playwright-Director

The Fire in the Flint

Walter White and The Work of a Mob

Dust Bowl Theater Programs for

Fire in the Flint

Two pages of the script for

Fire in the Flint

Melvin B. Tolson

Typescript

Foreground of Negro Poetry

from the archive:

Melvin B. Tolson

Selections

from Two Notebooks

Felton G. Clark

and
W.E.B. DuBois

A brief letter exchange

regarding Melvin B. Tolson

Jan 25, 1927 / Feb 4, 1927

A Selection of

Book Covers

& Other Items of Note

Melvin B. Tolson
and
Liberia

a few items

from the archive

Two Letters

Alain Locke to Tolson

and

George Schuyler

to Mrs. M.B.Tolson (Ruth)

regarding BLACK NO MORE

Music Score

Rendezvous with America

with music by Raymond Morris

Wiley College, 1943

M.B.Tolson & the Wiley College Players

Dillard Arts Festival Drama Calendar

May 4 – 5, 1938

M.B.Tolson

Microscope and Telescope

[c.1946] Speech Notes on

the NAACP Oklahoma Conference

Draft Typescripts of Poems

To The ‘Ibhri

The House of Heafod

final draft

John Henry, His Legend

final draft, 22 pages

The Anatomy of Courage

Masks of the Middle Voice

The Barrel

Madame De Tory’s Lover

Draft Typescript Samples of Poems

Hydrogen Bomb

Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

Harlem Gallery

Three One-Act Plays

(original typescripts)

Bivouac By The Santa Fe

The Fence War

“Transfiguration Springs”

from Upper Boulders in the Sun

The Oklahoma Golden Anniversary Play

AND

The Dust Bowl Players

Theater Programs

with images of the players

Tolson Links

James Farmer,

Gwendolyn Brooks,

Ronald Walcott,

Raymond Nelson,
Richard Wright,

Allen Tate / Poetry Magazine,

audio, video & reference.

SENT

Part 1:

Vestiges of Miriam

Joan McCracken

In this issue…

MELVIN BEAUNORUS TOLSON

was an educator, an organizer of sharecroppers, a scholar, a renowned debate coach, a playwright, a small town mayor — but most enduringly, and most intriguingly, a major poet in the High Modernist line from — but also in significant ways counter to — Ezra Pound and, especially, T.S. Eliot. Dying, age 67, at the height of his slow-building public recognition, embraced by white literati, rejected by Black Nationalists, Tolson experienced a strange fate. Never forgotten, neither has he received the general attention he deserves. But the vigorous flamboyance and seductive mystery of his poetry have continued to fascinate scholars.

Then in 1999 the University Press of Virginia brought out “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson,” gathering in one volume all the poetry published in his lifetime, with an enthusiastic introduction by Rita Dove. And in 2007 The Great Debaters hit the theaters, with Denzel Washington playing a Prof. Mel Tolson who was a rigorous and inspiring college debate coach by day and a fearless organizer of Texas sharecroppers, both white and black, by night. In between FlashPøint #4 printed a Brad Haas
Review of “Harlem Gallery” and Other Poems which for the last decade has consistently gotten some of the most hits of anything in FlashPøint. So attention is being paid. But now we want to celebrate Tolson’s poetry in a very big way.


FlashPøint is especially pleased that many of the leading Tolson scholars have contributed to this issue. Foremost among them, Robert Farnsworth, author of the major Tolson biography, Melvin B. Tolson 1898-1966: Plain Talk and Poetic Prophecy, in “Melvin B. Tolson Revisited” deftly sketches the prime developments of Tolson’s career, with particular focus on Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator and Libretto for the Republic of Liberia.


In “Melvin B. Tolson’s Ethical Experiment and the Philosophy of Otherness” Grant Jenkins discusses an “ethos of experimentation” in which Tolson embraces “the experience of being othered by a dominant culture,” courting contradiction and exploring what has been left out of both dominant white and black views of the world.”


Tolson’s complex and seemingly contradictory attitudes toward “race consciousness,” the situation of Africans in America, and relationships between African-Americans and Africans is explored in Tyrone Williams’s “The Pan-African-Americanism of Melvin B. Tolson”.


Aldon Nielsen addresses Tolson’s determination to write “the first modern Negro epic” in “Tolson’s Turn”.


Kathy Lou Schultz considers in “To Save and Destroy: Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Theories of the Archive” how Tolson and Langston Hughes used their poetry as an “archive” of African American “accomplishment” to counter Eurocentric efforts to keep such accomplishment outside historic consciousness.


Then there is Jon Woodson. In two essays — “Reading Melvin B. Tolson’s Harlem Gallery: Alchemy, Codes, and the Key to the Secret of Life” and “Melvin B. Tolson and Oragean Modernism: a Few Notes on the Problem of Esoteric Writers in American Literature” — Professor Woodson calls into question every conventional view of Tolson’s own accomplishment… which he finds considerable all the same. Researching the Harlem Renaissance, to which Tolson was a late pilgrim, Woodson discovered that one thing most of the Harlem writers had in common, but did not publicize, was a devotion to the system of self-development devised – in Europe – by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, and propagated in America by A.R. Orage and friends. Woodson presented his findings in To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance. It was Harlem Gallery, in conjunction with P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, which first led him to his investigation. His first essay here explains what he found in Tolson’s epic.

A Note on the Archives & other

internet resources



An author’s work finds its way into the world in often unexpected ways.
A poet-warehouse worker unloads a skid of remaindered Twayne books in 1977 (see
Workingman’s Tolson) and finds a poet with a “revolutionary/workingman’s vigor”, and a “more mature, passionate and experienced voice than even our greatest High-Modernist hot house flowers like Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Zukofsky and Olson…”


Years later this interest carried through to the rest of the FlashPøint staff, who put a Tolson issue on our agenda for an unspecified date. Finally, with a visit to the Melvin B. Tolson Papers at the Library of Congress and the interest of the noted Tolson scholar
Robert B. Farnsworth, we were ready to produce our issue.


This issue tries to supplement the old with the new. We offer new essays by passionate & intelligent Tolson scholars who continue to carry Tolson criticism forward from the early

Shapiro
/

Fabio
/
Tate debates. However we provide links or reproductions of some of that early criticism (including
Gwendolyn Brooks,

Ronald Walcott,
and
links to an Allen Tate ‘Opinion’ and a Lorenzo Turner review) to give newer Tolson fans a chance to catch up on some of those early critical responses.


We confess to an excitement at seeing the handwritten cross-outs and rewrites of the poet on typescripts of

Harlem Gallery,

Hydrogen Bomb and
the
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
and have included facsimiles of them here.


We’ve included selections from two handwritten notebooks: the spiral bound
Ready Stenographer and the hardbound

Sterling Record book. We hope the selections provide at least a flavor of the day-to-day insights that Tolson preserved by jotting them down in his notebooks. For example, the “Ready” book is aptly ink-titled on the cover “Ideas and Poems.”


We also provide copies of items that caught our critical eye – for example the page of a letter to Benjamin and Kate Bell where Tolson discusses Shapiro and calls himself “Marxist,” a page of the musical score by Raymond Morris of Rendezvous with America. And more.


And we include images of the programs of Tolson’s theater group,
The Dust Bowl Players. Tolson took seriously Dubois’s advice that what was needed was a Negro Theater “about us”, “by us”, “for us” and “near us” (The Crisis, July 1926). He brought Sartre, Inge, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry and others to the citizens near Wiley College in Marshall, Texas and Langston University in Langston, Oklahoma. We provide three of his own plays,

Bivouac By The Santa Fe
,

The Fence War, and

“Transfiguration Springs”, as well as a small section on his adaptation of Walter White’s novel

Fire in the Flint.


But, to our minds, Tolson’s literary excellence was in his poetry. So Carlo Parcelli selected seven of what we believe to be previously unpublished poems from the Archive to present here, poems that show Tolson’s range and power:

To The ‘Ibhri,

The House of Heafod,

John Henry, His Legend (22 page final draft),

The Anatomy of Courage,

Masks of the Middle Voice,

The Barrel,

Madame De Tory’s Lover,


You’ll find many other other items on Tolson, some from the archives and some from the vast resources of the internet, which we’ve aggregated into the issue to simplify the experience of accessing them.


Finally, as to the ‘difficulty’ of reading Tolson – rather than being ‘exclusive’, it’s Tolson’s ‘inclusivity’ of the world that attracts us.


Then with a complete change of subject from Melvin Tolson,
Joan McCracken further develops the story first unfolded in FlashPøint #10 (“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”) with SENT — Part 1: Vestiges of Miriam & Part II: The House that Jack Built.”

     We are eager to hear from you, especially about this issue, so please tell us what you think: [email protected]!