"Harlem Gallery" and Other Poems. - Review - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2001 by Edward Brunner

Raymond Nelson, ed. "Harlem Gallery" and Other Poems. By Melvin B. Tolson. Intro, by Rita Dove. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1999. 473 pp. $60.00 cloth/$18.95 paper.

Between 1944 and 1965, Melvin B. Tolson published three volumes of poetry that consolidate his reputation as one of the most original artists of the postwar years and one of the most demanding artists of modernity. Tolson's intellectually rigorous verse, always tending toward the extended sequence, is as unnerving as 1940s bebop, itself a determinedly ambitious statement that celebrates the wide-ranging authority and assimilative prowess of the black American. In poems designed to be equal in every respect to the sequences of Pound, Eliot, and Crane and which elaborately encode references to African and African American history, Tolson mounts, in Aldon Nielsen's words, "an assault upon Anglo-American modernism's territorial designs."

Although Tolson wrote plays and novels (all unpublished), he received accolades in his lifetime only for his poetry. Raymond Nelson's edition reproduces photographically the first printings of Tolson's three published volumes, along with thirty-four pages of uncollected poems that appeared in journals. As the volume's title suggests, though, the spotlight falls on Tolson's last work, the 150-page Harlem Gallery (1965), to which Nelson has appended over 100 pages of invaluable explanatory footnotes. Along with adding his own, he has streamlined, adapted, and when necessary corrected the 750-plus footnotes that Robert Julian Huot assembled for his pioneering (but unpublished) 1971 University of Utah Ph.D. dissertation, heretofore the only guidebook for scholars through the thickets of Tolson's text, as Nelson--somewhat stingily, in my opinion--attests (though Huot contributed mightily to our understanding, he receives just a half-sentence of acknowledgment). Nelson has also added a running paraphrase to each o f the poem's twenty-four sections, making explicit much that Tolson's telegraphic style has compressed. Marian Russell's 1980 study of Harlem Gallery offered synopses of various passages, but she regarded the poem as a piece of experimental modernism and stressed the intuitive leaps in the work. Nelson's emphasis falls on the oratorical side of the poem, and he is exceptionally alert to its narrative threads.

Nelson has digested, reassembled, and constructed a remarkable amount of material to render Harlem Gallery into a text that is newly accessible. As he explains in a recent essay that itself might have formed a fine introduction to a separate edition of Harlem Gallery, Tolson's last poem with "its extensive and precise learnedness and uncompromising obscurities, its syncopations of puns, neologisms, double negatives, labyrinthian syntax, and acrobatic prosody... bids fair to give literary hermeticism a bad name." To counter such hermeticism, Nelson presents the work as a drama dominated by the "literary fact that all of these characters are both wrong and right at various times." This approach diverges from Michael Berube's influential 1992 study, which argues that however many voices speak up in the course of the work, the poem is finally a conflict between two characters who represent different facets of artistic making: the poet who seeks popularity ("Hideho Heights") and the critic who affirms an avant-ga rde that shuns popularity (The Curator). For Berube, Harlem Gallery is valuable because it opens onto research and analysis, a model text for the multidisciplinary university and a companion to the novels of Thomas Pynchon. Nelson's Harlem Gallery leads readers to marvel at Tolson's idiosyncratic and stylized cast of characters, each of whom performs in an aria-like fashion. That Tolson's poem is recognizable in both settings is a tribute to its elasticity.

While Tolson's last book is treated handsomely in this edition, all the poems that preceded it seem left to fend for themselves, reduced to Other Poems. Since the recovery of "lost" history is central to Tolson's project--what the dominant culture doesn't want known, he was fond of telling his students, it hides in its libraries--all his texts cry out for annotation, not just Harlem Gallery. Nelson reprints without commentary Tolson's own footnotes for his 770- line Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and for "E. & O. E." (1951), a work that stands in relation to Libretto as "Gerontion" does to The Waste Land. (A portion of it is also recycled in Harlem Gallery.) "It is true," Nelson writes, that Tolson's "notes are intended more to be part of these poems than a guide to them, but they do provide the agile reader with helpful handles and levers." It would be an "agile reader" indeed who could transform Tolson's provocative additions into material that was primarily "helpful." How Tolson employs schol arship as a writerly strategy remains the least examined aspect of his poetics. When the Library of America's American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Volume II) reprints "Ti" from Libretto, it relegates Tolson's footnotes to the back with mundane notes written by editorial assistants--an act unthinkable for Eliot's notes on The Waste Land.