Al Filreis just released an excellent new podcast about Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo,” a poem I teach in my Modernism class. Just the recording of Lindsay reading his poem is worth the price of admission, or more really, since admission is free. Filreis stumbles badly out of the gate, though, by asking about how to “get beyond” the racism in “The Congo.” His interest is clearly in redeeming the poem as an early example of performance poetry, a poem as speech act rather than as text. In reading Lindsay this way, he looks forward poets like Olson and Duncan and tries to propose alternative Modernist roots that diverge from the textuality of poets like Eliot, Moore or Williams. The self-evident racism of Lindsay’s poem, then, presents Filreis with a problem, one to be “gotten beyond” so that Lindsay can be finally valorized. This desire to recuperate may also account for the discussion’s exclusive focus on the first section, with its anticolonial banishment of King Leopold to a hell where he will be forever maimed. Unmentioned is the poem’s final section, in which Mumbo-Jumbo, the African god is defeated by Christ and the Congo itself is “redeemed.”
Aldon Nielsen rightly brings Filreis up short by insisting that the racism of the poem isn’t something one can “get beyond.” Nielsen, along with the other panelists, argues that the poem be reintegrated into our understanding of Modernism, but Nielson understands that the poem’s racism is an integral part of its Modernism. In this, I think Nielsen demonstrates a more sophisticated grasp of the issue than either Filreis or Charles Bernstein, both incredibly smart guys who are usually the reason I listen to the podcast. Bernstein, for his part, presents Linday’s primitivism as if it were idiosyncratic. Lindsay, Bernstein argues, thinks white culture has lost touch with fundamental rhythms and connection to Yeatsian “song,” and that African-American culture offers a corrective to that alienation. “We typically think of racism as saying bad things about African-Americans,” Bernstein says, “but Lindsay is racist because he says, or intends to say, good things about African-Americans.” Perhaps Bernstein realizes that this is one of modernism’s central tropes, proposed in various ways by Carl van Vechten, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein and eventually Norman Mailer, to say nothing of African-American’s like W.E.B. Dubois in “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” his contribution to Alain Locke’s The New Negro. In their own way, Eliot’s Upanishads and Hemingway’s Basques represent a similar gesture. If Bernstein does realize the centrality of this recourse to primitivism, though, he certainly makes no mention of it in the podcast.
It is, though, the very ubiquity of Modernist primitivism that makes Lindsay such a key figure. Filreis believes that Lindsay was excised from the canon because his performative style of poetry conflicted with dominant textually based narratives about Modernism. I find that hard to credit for a couple of reasons. First, Lindsay’s aural effects on the page don’t appear much different than those offered by other Modernists; “Boomlay, Boom” seems perfectly in keeping with, and maybe a little staid compared to, Stevens’ “hoobla hoobla hoobla how” or Williams “marrruu.” Filreis can insist that Lindsay’s performance of these nonsense syllables fundamentally differed from those of the solemn Stevens or the adenoidal Williams, but in the days before great internet archives like Penn Sound, very few readers could have been aware of these differences in performance. The page really was inescapable as a medium for the transmission of poetry, as Olson’s comments on the typewriter demonstrate. More importantly, though, Filreis’ own chronology has Lindsay disappearing from the canon during the 1970s and 1980s, the very period that witnesses the mainstreaming of bardic poets like Ginsberg, and the emergence from the workshops of a model of poetic creation centered on the metaphor of “voice,” as Mark McGurl discusses in his recent The Program Era. If Lindsay’s exclusion from the canon were motivated by his privileging of voice over text, wouldn’t that exclusion have occurred under the banner of New Critical irony? That it didn’t is testified to in part by my first exposure to “The Congo,” in Hayden Carruth’s The Voice that Is Great within Us. Though I can’t evoke the same kind of conspiracy that makes Filreis’ claim so interesting, I think the more obvious answer is the more likely one: As classroom’s became more diverse and the Black Arts movement made it harder to “get beyond” racism that had once been glossed over as impolite, it became harder to teach “A Study of the Negro Race” that opens with a section titled “Their Basic Savagery.”
Which is both good and bad. Good that the racism of the poem is recognized, neither ignored nor explained away, but bad that, as Bernstein points out in the podcast, many white writers who simply ignored African-American experience (sorry, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, but I am looking at you.) are given a free pass. Lindsay, a populist poet who walked from Illinois to New Mexico trading books of his poems for food, saw himself as Whitman’s heir, and in many ways he was. Lindsay, like Sandburg and Robinson, partakes of an American modernism that never had to make “A Pact” with Whitman, that never decamped for Paris or London. Restoring Lindsay to the Modernist canon isn’t just about finding a godfather for spoken word, but really about locating Modernism within the American culture of the early twentieth century. That’s what makes it essential not to get beyond the poem’s racism. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
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