Charles Bernstein finds this "one of the most interesting poems to teach," and adds: "[Lindsay] felt there was something deeply wrong with white culture, that it was hung up, ... that it was disembodied, that it was too abstract." All the problems of the poem, Charles notes, remain present when one reads or hears it. It's all there. It's not a "bad example" of something; it makes its own way (or loses its way) in the modern poetic tradition, as it is...I agree with Nielsen. Like the whole phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy, The Congo really is at the heart of race matters in this country. And the story of Lindsay's life and poems is fascinating. I think it was wrong to delete him and his poems from the taught canon.
Aldon [Nielsen] doesn't want to "get past" the tension between Lindsay's desire to make a progressive statement and the racist content in the poem; as a whole, this work creates a tension that is "absolutely at the core of American culture." Aldon is hesitant to use the phrase "teachable moment" (which during 2009 has been a phrase that is dulled from facile overuse in the "ongoing conversation" about race) but that--teachability--is about the sum of it: to teach this poem is to gain access to a central American discussion.
W. E. B. Du Bois strongly criticized "The Congo"; but Lindsay's story "The Golden-Faced People" had been published in an earlier issue of The Crisis and was hailed by Du Bois himself for its insight into the injustice of racism, so Lindsay does not appear to have been irremediably racist in outlook. Lindsay was in fact widely regarded as a person of liberal and antiracist sympathies, evident not least in Lindsay's famous "discovery" of Langston Hughes as a busboy poet in a Washington, DC, hotel restaurant. The event was misconstrued by Lindsay as an instance of genuine patronage--that, but for Lindsay's intervention, Hughes would have forever languished as a menial laborer--when actually, by the time of the incident in 1925, Hughes had already been published in The Crisis, would win the poetry prize in the Opportunity literary competition of that year, and had had his first book, The Weary Blues, already accepted by Alfred A. Knopf. It was Hughes himself, not Lindsay, who was the prime mover of his career, right down to the moment in the hotel restaurant when Hughes took the initiative, dropping a sheaf of his poems on Lindsay's table. Yet Lindsay was the right poet for Hughes to seek out, open-minded enough to appreciate the poems: he recited all three of them at his poetry reading that evening and thereupon announced the discovery of a "bona fide poet". And Hughes was happy enough to make use of the publicity served up by Lindsay's naive claim of discovery. The next day he played up the role of the dazzled prodigy for the reporters who hounded him, and upon his return to New York he arranged for an Underwood and Underwood representative to photograph him posing as a busboy. In turn, the literati associated with Opportunity, always tending to be more open and flexible in their conceptions of artistic expression than their peers at The Crisis, do not appear to have been overly chagrined by Lindsay's rhetoric or purportedly racist poetry, as in 1926 they made Lindsay one of the judges for the magazine's second literary contest and even mentioned The Congo and Other Poems among the accomplishments qualifying him for the role...Lindsay and Racism
In the 1920s, at least, Du Bois's political assumptions fundamentally shaped the debate; the exponents of the more experimental, black writing like Claude McKay and Langston Hughes did not assert its superior cultural politics, as we might today, but its superior artistry--the wider range of expression possible, the greater possibilities of form and language. When Carl Van Vechten, a major promoter of black writers, published his novel Nigger Heaven in 1926, his portrayal of black Harlem was immediately attacked by political critics in the black community as a racist white performance in blackface; it was just as swiftly defended by the literary avant garde in the community as a feat of literary imagination. In this context--and among writers of the avant garde like Hughes--Vachel Lindsay's poetry on black subject matter and appropriating black voices did not appear so far out of place. Lindsay did not thus appear an inappropriate choice to be one of the judges for the 1926 Opportunity contest. Likewise, the inclusion of "The Congo" in Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps's landmark anthology, The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949, makes sense, even if it may now be jarring. Long after there was any mileage to be made of his "discovery" by Lindsay, Hughes chose to include him in the section of "Tributary Poems by Non-Negroes." "The Congo" appears, as well, in the revised edition appearing in 1970, so Bontemps, who lived to supervise the publication of this edition, apparently concurred with Hughes's choice.
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posted by wheelieman at 2:08 PM on February 10, 2010