Mbtcpworkingman

Ray and I were scurrying about in the blinding
heat helping direct a driver with a forty foot
trailer into Kramer’s single bay warehouse. With
cars parked on both sides of the street, he had only
inches to spare and had missed on his first pass.

“Hit it this time and there’s a beer in it for
ya,” Ray called out to the driver. The driver,
sweating profusely adjusted his cap, and tried
again. The second time he shot the narrow gap,
turned hard right and near perfectly plugged the
rear of the trailer into the bay.

Backing up a forty foot trailer is an art in
itself and deserving of our admiration and praise
and a chilly National Bo when done well. The driver
dropped the latch and yanked up the rear trailer
door as Ray popped him a cold one.

We were his last stop of the day and our eight
skids were tightly wedged in at the front of the
trailer directly behind the cab. I dropped a ‘lip’
to bridge the gap between the warehouse and the rear
of the trailer. Then I got our manual hydraulic
lift, the downward angle of the trailer being too
steep for the forklift.

I rolled the lift down into the dark, suffocating
heat in the bowels of the trailer. Then I deftly
slid the arms of the lift under a skid, pressed the
hydraulic foot, and began pumping the skid off the
floor. Once a few inches up, I began pulling the
skid up a slope just enough that my co-workers Ray,
Allen and Michael could get behind it and push.

One skid down. In a matter of minutes, all eight
skids were unloaded. Beers all around.

I took a couple of gulps of Baltimore ambrosia aka
National Bohemian, and began hauling the first skid
into the cool inner sanctum of the warehouse. Once
again, the entire shipment was inventoried and
stacked in a just a few minutes. After a second Bo,
the driver was on his way to an early weekend of
crabbing on the Chesapeake with his sons.

Me. I was curious to see what was on the new
skids. As it turned out it was 8 skids of the Twayne
author series. Twayne is a house famous for its
dissertation length studies of literary figures —
some now obscure like Israel Zangwill, Elmer Rice or
Marie Grubbe. Some remain in the public imagination
like Whitman, Dickens and Richard Wright. Ashbery
has a Twayne, as does L. Sprague de Camp. There are
literally thousands of titles under their imprint.

Of course Tolson was also familiar with the working
man’s experience.  As a young man he was a
trucker.  In a Caviar and Cabbage column, as
cited in Robert Farnsworth’s biography of Tolson, he
described in precise and colorful detail his
initiation to the meaning of class: 

Some Twaynes present primary material as on this
day. I found two boxes of the second printing of a
poet named Melvin B. Tolson. The volume contained
what appeared to be a single long poem called Harlem
Gallery with sections named after the Greek
alphabet. Karl Shapiro had written the introduction.

I sat on a skid of books with my cold Bo and began
to read. The initial section of Harlem Gallery,
Alpha, challenged me in the way I was when I first
discovered Pound’s Cantos under the tutelage of the
incomparable Rudd Fleming. I got past Tolson’s
intent behind the reference to Goya’s painting The
Second of May and the reference to Murat, both
politically charged revolutionary statements. But
what the Hell was ‘the Day of Barricades’.

Well, the Day of Barricades according to the
current Wikipedia entry is:

I was accustomed to reading and studying highly
referential poets like Pound, Joyce, Olson and
Zukofsky. And I loved being challenged by poetry. I
immediately took a copy and poured over it. Tolson
stepped beyond them all. For the first time in my
literary experience, the white man, the white poet
was wearing the shackles vis a vis his material and
that materials exegeses. I was later to learn this
was Tolson’s intent. It was his goal. It was
admirably achieved. To paraphrase Tolson, he ‘would
out Eliot Eliot’ and create a Pan-Cultural poetry,
something that had occurred to Picasso and the art
world but was still anathema to the Euro-locked
world of poetry.

My then nine year old daughter, Carmen, took part
in a number of after school activities including
play rehearsals which often ran late. I would go
directly from work to the school to pick her up
because that would give an hour or so to use the
school’s Britannica to look up Tolson’s references.
Now, I can do that right at my computer which
further emphasizes that intellectual laziness and an
addiction to sentimentality is no longer an excuse
for not understanding, appreciating and learning
from the modernists.

Cold Dog Soup

Over the years, Tolson has presented me with a
whole new challenge. Harlem Gallery was the first
Tolson I believe I had encountered and this after
gaining a Master’s in English Literature in the
1960’s and 1970’s! I blame myself, mired in a
curriculum that was energized by either the
supercilious, sentimental, psychotropic or psychotic
with a largely worthy and tried canon under attack.
I resisted the easy trade between popular culture
and literature and studied Pound, Olson, Joyce,
Tolson, Zukofsky et al instead.

Tolson’s left perspective and
revolutionary/workingman’s vigor are also to my
liking. I found it intellectually and emotionally
superior to the fascist Pound and the coy neutrality
of Joyce. I can’t help but believe race and the
sheer horror and necessary resolve of being black in
America made Tolson’s a more mature, passionate and
experienced voice than even our greatest
High-Modernist hot house flowers like Pound, Eliot,
Joyce, Zukofsky and Olson, not to mention the
sentimental sissies that dominate today’s poetry
canon. Tolson was a high modernist poet and writer
one did not have to make excuses for, either in the
quality of their work or the quality of their life.

Tolson worked with southern sharecroppers both
black and white to help them improve their lot,
risking lynching on more than one occasion. Pound is
the only other High Modernist poet who engaged the
world he lived in to the extent that he faced
hanging albeit, at the end of the day, by the same
forces that would have done in Tolson if chance
warranted it. But even Karl Shapiro couldn’t sort
that one out. Where Pound was fumbling around for
his philosopher king, Tolson was working to help
working men and women, Pound’s peasants, keep their
bellies full and those of their children and aged
charges.

So when I recently needed the name of the Roman
comic actor from the first century BC, I remembered
the first page of Tolson’s Harlem Gallery. In
‘Alpha’ Tolson writes:

“Sometimes a Roscius as tragedian

sometimes a Kean as clown.”

Mel Tolson, high modernist, educator, revolutionary
and poet!

Why
is Mel Tolson’s Poetry Largely Ignored?

The usual rap on Tolson is that his poetry is too
Eurocentric. This is due to his highly referential
style which is reminiscent of Eliot and Pound and
High Modernism in general.

But Eurocentric? Nothing could be further from the
truth. In fact, given the epistemology of sentiment
as it operates in African-American poetry from its
inception, Tolson is the least Eurocentric of all
the black poets. The deep Christian sentiments held
forth in much of African-American poetry is one
example. Another is the seeming need to reconstruct
a past as counterpoint to the present without regard
to the depth at which the European ethos still
operates within these supposedly newly discovered
pre-colonial connections and sentiments.

Tolson’s intention is certainly not to confirm or
ratify the European ethos. In fact, he’s out to not
only condemn it but to place its colonial, imperial
bent within a greater global context. To Tolson the
‘other’ is out there and it has its own power. So he
throws it into the High Modernist mix and allows it
to slay the colonial beast. His intent is to
vanquish and gut the European/American behemoth and
lay bare the stench of its content beside that of a
greater global ethos.

I hasten to add that Tolson is not adverse to
using the ‘better angels’ of the European ethos to
aid in his task.

Superficially Tolson may resemble Pound or Eliot.
Context wise there may be overlap. But Tolson’s
project is to subsume Western hegemonic culture in a
larger Pan-Culture which because of its diversity
and strength will overcome the European genocidal
bogey.

He accomplishes this by the indirect methods
available to the High Modernist sensibility. That
makes his poetry ‘difficult.’ However, with the
advent of the internet and search engines, gaining
an understanding of Tolson’s fine work is far easier
than it was when I pulled the Twayne publication off
of a skid one hot DC day in 1977.

Postscript:

  Rosalie
and I watched the film The Great Debaters starring Denzel
Washington on video. The film purported to be about
Mel Tolson but not once did it mention that not only
was Tolson a poet but handily one of the greatest of
all American poets. That’s like doing a biopic of
James Joyce without mentioning Ulysses or Finnegans
Wake. Or Pound sans the Cantos. Or Olson stripped of
Maximus.

Frankly, I think the film makers did Tolson a
great disservice. But one can also construe that
Tolson’s life was so full of teaching, the theater
and helping poor sharecroppers that the poetry was
overlooked by the film makers because among all of
these other achievements poetry in general has
become a pointless, rote exercise in our culture.
Not really knowing much about Tolson, the film
makers may have just seen his poetry as irrelevant
because, as far as they can see, all poetry has
become such.

Fortunately, many reviews of the film set the
record straight. Prominent among them was Laura
Beil’s review which appeared in the New York Times
for December 5, 2007 entitled
“For Struggling Black College, Hopes of a Revival”.