Holger Dansk wrote:
On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 16:13:17 -0400, Bob LeChevalier
wrote:

Holger Dansk wrote:

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
...

PLease indicate the relevance of Vachel Lindsay.

He wrote the above poem.

Duh. Since you didn't mention his name or give him credit, I supplied
that information. But why is it relevant? Poetry is seldom
considered as factual evidence of anything.

It helps set the mood of the way the black savages lived in the bush
with flies buzzing around and the smell of hyena and lion doo doo and
the stench of carrion in the breeze. You could probably smell the
savages a mile away.

http://www.bartleby.com/65/li/LindsayV.html

Please indicate what in his biography leads you to believe that Vachel
Lindsay had any clue how people in Africa live(d). He wrote rhythmic
poetry based on then-dominant stereotypes, which had no more in common
with reality than your pontifications.

Lindsay claimed that the poem tries to synthesize "vaudeville form back
towards the old Greek precedent of the half-chanted lyric" and also
spoke of it as "a rag-tune epic." This marked desire to fuse ancient
poetic culture with more recent Euro- and African-American performance
materials is part of Lindsay’s yearning to do something helpful to
extirpate racial prejudice (in the aftermath of the Springfield
anti-black riots in 1908), a yearning which is totally swamped by the
poem’s raucous, sinister primitivisms.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...dsay/congo.htm

Now answer my question. What in his biography leads you to believe
that Vachel Lindsay had any clue how people in Africa live(d)?

The essay cited provides no answer to that question.

Indeed another quote on the same page explains why his perspective is
NOT valid:
Though it is true that Lindsay's early life brought him into contact
with a greater variety of black people than did Gertrude Stein's, it
is especially significant for this inquiry that when asked by
"elegant ladies" how he had acquired his knowledge of the Negro, he
begins his response with a purely literary source. He remembers
clearly that his father used to read to the children from Uncle
Remus, and so, even before Lindsay began to have significant contacts
with blacks, he was internalizing a primarily linguistic structure of
thought about them. All his future experiences would be filtered
through a metaphorical veil, and the nonwhite could speak to him only
through the concocted idioms of Joel Chandler Harris.

and from DuBois
Mr. Vachel Lindsay knows two things, and two things only, about
Negroes: The beautiful rhythm of their music and the ugly side of
their drunkards and outcasts. From this poverty of material he tries
now and then to make a contribution to Negro literature. ...Mr. Lindsay
knows little of the Negro, and that little is dangerous.

lojbab
--
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org