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(02/21/2012) Harlem Gallery: Book 1, The Curator by Melvin B. Tolson. New York. 1965. Twayne Publishers. Preface by Karl Shapiro. keywords: Poetry Black America Literature Harlem. 173 pages. August 1965.
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FROM THE PUBLISHER - The originality, power and range of M. B. Tolson's first book, Rendezvous with America, with its visual and auditory figures, its juxtaposed ideas and dramatis personae, awakened memories of Whitman and Hart Crane and our heritage. This first volume was the beginning of a poetic odyssey in the great tradition. In 1947, for the Liberian Centennial and International Exposition, M. B. Tolson received his commission as Poet Laureate of Liberia. Three years later the diatonic Seventh Section of the Libretto appeared in Poetry, together with Allen Tate's now-famous Preface. In 1953 the work in progress was completed and published. It became a landmark in Negro literature, and President William V. S. Tubman decorated the author with his country's highest award, the Star of Africa. An honored guest of the Liberian government, M. B. Tolson attended the third inauguration. Three months before the publication of Harlem Gallery, the New York Herald Tribune said in a feature article: 'Tolson has been recognized by eminent men of letters for a long time and at the extremes of the literary spectrum. Theodore Roethke, Selden Rodman, Robert Frost. John Ciardi and Stanley Hyman have tried to bring Tolson to the general literary consciousness, but with little success,- And now, one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Book I of the epic Harlem Gallery appears on our horizon, Balzacian in depth and scope, with its lowbrow's and middlebrows and highbrows of Afroamerica: Doctor Nkomo. the Bantu expatriate and Africanist; Hideho Heights, the Redskin beatnik bard of Lenox Avenue; Mr. Guy Delaporte the shogun of Bola Boa Enterprises, Inc.; Black Orchid, his blues-singing striptease mistress of the Bamboo Kraal; Dr. Igor Shears, the stoic West Indian patron of the Harlem Symphony Orchestra; Snakehips Briskie, the forefather of the Twisters; John Laugart, the half-blind artist from the Harlem catacombs; Martial Kilroy. the president of Afroamerican Freedom, Inc.; Black Diamond, the kingpin of the policy racket in the black ghetto. Karl Shapiro says of the Harlem Gallery: 'Massive as it is, it is only a beginning of a greater work, a kind of Odyssey of the American Negro, of which this is the prologue. The Gallery returns to the basic themes of the Libretto. One of these is the accusation of Gertrude Stein that the Negro `suffers from Nothingness.' Written in a style conforming to the ode form of the earlier poem, it is in fact a narrative work so fantastically stylized that the mind balks at comparisons The milieu is Harlem, from the Twenties on. The dramatis personae comprise every symbolic character from the black bourgeois babbitt. to the alienated professor and sage who sits in the bar and elaborates, along with The Curator and the Zulu Club Wits, a Platonic dialogue. The give-and-take moves on a level of talk about the arts--a floor which is constantly caving in and plunging the reader into the depths of metaphysical horror which journalists nowadays refer to as the Race Question. 'But like so many great works of poetry it is a comic poem. It is funny, witty, humoristic, slapstick, crude, cruel, bitter and hilarious. The baroque surface of the poem modifies none of this. The Harlem Gallery is as if improvised by one of the great architects of modern poetry. It may be that this work, like other works of its quality in the past, will turn out to be not only an end in itself but the door to poetry that everyone has been looking for.'.
Check zenosbooks.com for a copy of this book
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