Some additional poems from Henry Dumas's "Saba" cycle are included in the newsletter linked at the start of the thread. I'm working with "Knees of a Natural Man," a selected poems edited in 1989 by Eugene Redmond. There is a beautiful edition currently in print:

https://www.floodeditions.com/dumas-knees-of-a-natural-man.php

Here is the scanned first edition:

https://archive.org/details/kneesofnaturalma00duma/mode/1up

#Poetry #HenryDumas

Dumas was not well published in his lifetime, but through the efforts in particular of Eugene Redmond and Toni Morrison, his writing has gained somewhat wider recognition. Henry Dumas was shot and killed by New York City Transit Police in 1968, at age 33.

#Poetry #HenryDumas

In contrast to Black Arts movement figurehead Amiri Baraka, whose work frequently sought universality in the particular, to the point of obscuring the poem's personal and specific origins, Henry Dumas's aesthetic feels more present in the complexities and interpersonal commitments of everyday life, even when he reaches outside his own experience. There is a quality of untranslatability in the intimate work of Dumas, a window onto the experience and outlook of one individual navigating a complex web of relationships.

#Poetry #HenryDumas

Henry Dumas was a young poet active in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. His writing strikes me as a particularly intimate and rooted example of Black Arts era poetry. Dumas was interested in folk traditions and mythologies of the Black diaspora, but devoted equal attention to phenomenological themes relating to embodied experience and relationships with the people around him.

#Poetry #HenryDumas

we shall be riding dragons in those days

black unicorns challenging the eagle

        we shall shoot words

        with hooves that kick clouds

        fire eaters from the sun

we shall lay the high white dome to siege

cover screams with holy wings, in those days

                                        we shall be terrible

---

"Saba: Black Paladins"

by Henry Dumas

#Poetry #BlackArtsMovement #HenryDumas