Saturday, February 6, 2016

Birthday: Melvin Tolson, African-American Modernist Poet



Melvin Beaunorus Tolson (1898-1966)
Poet, educator

Grandson of slaves, Tolson graduated Lincoln University in 1924, and took a teaching post at the historically African-American Wiley University in Marshall, Texas. There, in addition to his classes, he ran the dramatic program and raised a champion debate team that won national fame for defeating the University of Southern California team in 1935. The team’s success was recreated in the 2007 film, The Great Debaters, with Denzel Washington playing Tolson.

In 1930-31 Tolson did graduate work at Columbia University, presenting a thesis on the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He took up poetry in that period, though his first significant published work, Dark Symphony, won a competition in 1939. It was printed in The Atlantic Monthly in 1941, raising Tolson to national attention. He published his first collection of poetry in 1944, and three years later was named Poet Laureate of Liberia.

That year he took a post at Langston University in Oklahoma, there also teaching and directing the theater program. He was named permanent fellow in poetry and drama at the Bread Loaf writer’s colony in 1954, a year after winning acclaim for Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, an eight-part epic written for the nation’s centenary.

Tolson also served as mayor of Langston for three terms, 1952-58. His last collection of poetry, published in 1965, won the praise of many critics, including John Ciardi, though, overall, his work did not enjoy the fame it might have had he not spent his career in the segregationist southwest. In the midst of his appointment as Avalon Poetry in the Tuskegee Institute, he was diagnosed with cancer, and died in 1966.

Tolson’s poetry is rich and allusive, moving back and forth between high and low culture idioms. His work showed a progression from an easy accessibility that Langston Hughes praised, to a more complex modernist style as he found his voice. Since Tolson’s death his work has received more scholarly attention as part of the reappraisal of the forgotten and overlooked African-American writers of the 20th century. The University of Virginia published his collected works in 1999.

A Song for Myself

   I judge
                                           My soul
                                           Eagle
                                           Nor mole:
                                           A man
                                           Is what
                                           He saves
                                           From rot.
                                          
                                           The corn
                                           Will fat
                                           A hog
                                           Or rat:
                                           Are these
                                           Dry bones
                                           A hut’s
                                           Or throne’s?
                                          
                                           Who filled
                                           The moat
                                           ’Twixt sheep
                                           And goat?
                                           Let Death,
                                           The twin
                                           of Life,
                                           Slip in?
                                          
                                           Prophets
                                           Arise,
                                           Mask-hid,
                                           Unwise,
                                           Divide
                                           The earth
                                           By class
                                           and birth.
                                          
                                           Caesars
                                           Without,
                                           The People
                                           Shall rout;
                                           Caesars
                                           Within,
                                           Crush flat
                                           As tin.
                                          
                                           Who makes
                                           A noose
                                           Envies
                                           The goose.
                                           Who digs
                                           A pit
                                           Dices
                                           For it.
                                          
                                           Shall tears
                                           Be shed
                                           For those
                                           Whose bread
                                           Is thieved
                                           Headlong?
                                           Tears right
                                           No wrong.
                                          
                                           Prophets
                                           Shall teach
                                           The meek
                                           To reach.
                                           Leave not
                                           To God
                                           The boot
                                           And rod.
                                          
                                           The straight
                                           Lines curve?
                                           Failure
                                           Of nerve?
                                           Blind-spots
                                           Assail?
                                           Times have
                                           Their Braille.
                                          
                                           If hue
                                           Of skin
                                           Trademark
                                           A sin,
                                           Blame not
                                           The make
                                           For God's
                                           Mistake.
                                          
                                           Since flesh
                                           And bone
                                           Turn dust
                                           And stone,
                                           With life
                                           So brief,
                                           Why add
                                           To grief?
                                          
                                           I sift
                                           The chaff
                                           From wheat
                                           and laugh.
                                           No curse
                                           Can stop
                                           The tick
                                           Of clock.
                                          
                                           Those who
                                           Wall in
                                           Themselves
                                           And grin
                                           Commit
                                           Incest
                                           And spawn
                                           A pest.
                                          
                                           What’s writ
                                           In vice
                                           Is writ
                                           In ice.
                                           The truth
                                           Is not
                                           Of fruits
                                           That rot.
                                          
                                           A sponge,
                                           The mind
                                           Soaks in
                                           The kind
                                           Of stuff
                                           That fate’s
                                           Milieu
                                           Dictates.
                                          
                                           Jesus,
                                           Mozart,
                                           Shakespeare,
                                           Descartes,
                                           Lenin,
                                           Chladni,
                                           Have lodged
                                           With me.
                                          
                                           I snatch
                                           From hooks
                                           The meat
                                           Of books.
                                           I seek
                                           Frontiers,
                                           Not worlds
                                           On biers.
                                          
                                           The snake
                                           Entoils
                                           The pig
                                           With coils.
                                           The pig’s
                                           Skewed wail
                                           Does not
                                           Prevail.
                                          
                                           Old men
                                           Grow worse
                                           With prayer
                                           Or curse:
                                           Their staffs
                                           Thwack youth
                                           Starved thin
                                           For truth.
                                          
                                           Today
                                           The Few
                                           Yield poets
                                           Their due;
                                           Tomorrow
                                           The Mass
                                           Judgment
                                           Shall pass.
                                          
                                           I harbor
                                           One fear
                                           If death
                                           Crouch near:
                                           Does my
                                           Creed span
                                           The Gulf
                                           Of Man?
                                          
                                           And when
                                           I go
                                           In calm
                                           Or blow
                                           From mice
                                           And men,
                                           Selah!
                                           What . . . then?


#HenryBemisBooks #LiteraryBirthdays #AfricanAmericanPoets #MelvinTolson

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