Harlem Gallery

by Melvin B. Tolson

A magnificent comic ode to Harlem by the great Afro-American poet.

"Harlem Gallery is funny, witty, humoristic, slapstick, crude, bitter, and hilarious ... 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." --Karl Shapiro

Genres: Poetry, African American

155 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

Reviews

[Amy Yue-Yin Chan · Rating 5 out of 5]

6/5 stars. An epic to rival The Wasteland or The Cantos, Harlem Gallery riffs on the modernist narrative of the poet wandering the "unreal city" with a plot localized in Harlem and a dialectic that challenges 20th century ideas of race. The poem is densely allusive, as in the style of modernist epics, yet many of Tolson's allusions are fabricated or misleading -- puns off of foreign languages and not exact quotations of canonical texts ("O Xenos of Xanthos") -- and the references of some of them are restricted to Tolson's knowledge alone (at certain points, the editor of the UVA edition of the poem, Raymond Nelson, footnotes that he has no idea what Tolson is talking about). Harlem Gallery is worth reading for an idea of what a modernist epic could do in the hands of someone less reactionary than Pound, but beyond that, it is a magnificent poem filled with a little bit of everything: spoofs of popular jazz poets, fable, Plato, a treatise on Black art, a meditation on the intersections between class and Blackness, and a record of the Harlem Renaissance at its height (albeit slightly fictionalized).

[Seán · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an idiot philistine, I ain't much up on my poetry. Even scanning a page of perms can be taxing. So, it was with much surprise I found myself glorying in Tolson's erudite verse (allusions to Greek, Roman, Biblical, Middle Eastern, and Norse mythology, 19th Century Art, more poets than can be counted, Mizzou, Tin Pan Alley, Uptown, etc., etc.). The man must have been one of the greatest wits of his age.

Excerpts:

Nothing is so desolating
as a deserted night club
with Is seated in the chair of Is Not--
the skull of a way of life that faces the crack of doom
with wine and wit and wiggle.

...

Although his transition
was a far cry
from Shakespeare to Sardou,
the old Africanist's byplay gave no soothing feverfew
to the Dogs in the Zulu Club;
said he:
"A Hardyesque artistry
of circumstance
divides the Whites and Blacks in life,
like the bodies of the dead
eaten by vultures
in a Tower of Silence.
Let, then, the man with a maggot in his head
lean ... lean ... lean
on race or caste or class,
for the wingless worms of blowflies shall grub,
dry and clean,
the stinking skeletons of these,
when the face of the macabre weather-
cock turns to the torrid wind of misanthropy;
and later their bones shall be swept together
(like the Parsees')
in the Sepulchre of Anonymity."

[Jennifer Ciotta · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a complicated read. Whew! Tolson uses such complicated metaphors and allusions in his poetry, it's hard to read. I loved the Americana poem, it should be more popular. I really like Harlem Gallery too. Unfortunately, Tolson wasn't that famous in his time bc his fellow blacks rejected him for writing like a white man, and whites rejected him for being too black. Poor guy.

[Jennifer Kanke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another book a student reccomended. Amazing. I suggest reading it twice. Once quickly to let the poetry be poetry and the second time slowly to parse through all the allusions.