I was already planning to do a post on Mr. Dumas though for some reason, I’d forgotten or maybe never knew that he wrote poetry. Anyway, I came across some pdfs of old literary magazine issues. I do have a certain affectation for back issues especially from the year or decade of my birth. But that is a quirk I will debone later. Anyway, these were old issues of the Hiram Poetry Review. I read an interview he had done with Sun-Ra, Issue#3 Fall-Winter, 1967 and I clicked my way to Issue #5 Fall-Winter, 1968. The Editorial began like this: On Thursday, May 23rd, one of our editors was shot to death on a New York City subway platform. His name was Henry Dumas. The man who killed him was a Transit Authority policeman named Peter Beinkowski. (Damn!) The death of Henry Dumas fills us with grief and bewilderment. He was a man of magnitudes, and we loved him. No rehearsal of his consider- able talents, his kindness, or his accomplishments would be adequate to dramatize our horror at his death or to ease the pain of his departure. We shall simply remember him, and we shall work to ensure that his writings find publication and become a monument his wife, his children, and his friends can visit in a future filled with his astonishing and unanticipated absence. It is a sorry coincidence that the last issue of this magazine was dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King. Both of these very special men were black men, and both were killed by bullets. We do not like such symmetries. No society can thrive where they arise with regularity. Where such symmetries proliferate, man soon deserves that there should be no love, no joy, no peace, no poetry. So, I will leave this post at that. Born: July 20, 1934, Sweet Home, AR Died: May 23, 1968, Manhattan, New York, NY
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A beautiful, respectful remembrance. We had read his works in school. Our teacher failed to tell us how (and when) he had died.
Feeling shattered right now.