Ark of Bones (1970) / Poetry for My People (1971) /   Play Ebony  Play Ivory   (1974)  / Jonah and the Green Stone (1976)

 Rope of Wind and Other Stories (1979)  / Goodbye, Sweetwater (1988) / Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989)

 Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas

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Introduction by Jay Wright

Henry Dumas lived very rapidly, and very slowly. We could never seem to keep up with him, or catch him, or hold him when we did. It wasn't that Dumas avoided any of us. There was simply so very much to do. And he had so many friends, in whose work and persons he took a deep interest, that it seemed as if he didn't want to disappoint any of us, as if he had each day to come to each of us and prod and cajole and reaffirm his belief in whatever tasks we were about.

During the time that he was an on-again-off-again student at Rutgers University, he spent a great deal of time trying to organize informal readings, or starting or promoting small publications, or persuading one or another of his friends to go to a gospel concert. It was very hard to figure just when he had time to write. But he did write, and quite a bit. Whenever he appeared, he had stacks of new poems, pages of a novel, articles, prose poems, sketches for a play. To conclude that he lived in an absurd swiftness would be a mistake. For Dumas had heavy roots, in his people, in the land, that balanced the intensity of his day-today push toward a coherent, artistic system that could express and even, in a sense, redeem those values he cared about.

In the letter that Dumas wrote to accompany his contribution to Black Fire, the anthology edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, he said, "I am very much concerned about what is happening to my people and what we are doing with out precious tradition." Dumas was the poet of the dispossessed. But it must be clear that his assumption is that we are dispossessed of something, and, for Dumas, that is land, absolute participation in the natural processes, mythic and humane gesture, spirit. Images of land, animals, birds, plants, pervade this book. There are few poems that deal with city here, and in those few the city is portrayed as a  cage, closed, antagonistic, a corrupter of the spirit.

Dumas was not by any means naive. There is certainly no simple opposition between the joys of the open and the deadness of the cities. He knew that life in the open is dangerous, that death is just as real there, and he shows it to be that way. What, to his mind, makes the dispossession of Black people so acute is that "the spirits are displeased," cowardly men have severed the vital connection with the very rhythm and processes that Dumas felt were their particular and unique possession. In "Son of Msippi," he writes,

Nothing is left out. The picture of the struggle of life is all the more compelling because it is so simply stated and accepted. But the condemned are the bringers of death who ignore "the colored coat I spun," and who cannot participate with the same depth and intensity in the natural processes, or be as totally committed to and part of the land.

This sense of place, this sense of life style are very important in understanding Dumas' poetry. Dumas is almost never an observer, standing outside the poem, making comments about the action that goes on in it. All you have to do to affirm this is to look at the poems in the section "Play Ebony Play Ivory." Not that this way of working is limited to that section. But take, for example, "Hunt,"

Dumas is there. the rhythm is the perception. The language is participation in the act. or consider "Rite." Dumas is in that rite. Shango is not talked about, used. Shango is part of Dumas' very consciousness, a god in his imagination, alive and active in the bones of an Afro-American from Arkansas. or go to "I laugh Talk Joke," which is verbal play that Dumas took, in part directly from the streets and to which he added lines of his own.

None of this is perverse, intellectual play. It is indicative of Dumas' sense of history. In "Emoyeni, Place of the Winds," he writes, "I see with my skin and hear with my tongue." Taking that line out of context may be to diminish it, but the force of the line seems to warrant looking at it apart from its context. The line, I suggest, asserts some elementary truths about Dumas', and not alone Dumas', poetic techniques. This book, Poetry for My People , is grounded in that line. The skin is present, living, but it is also history.

What Dumas means is that there are racial and social determinants of perception, ideas that he he was just beginning to develop. The mind articulates what the senses have selected from the field, and this articulation is, in part, determined by what the perceiver has learned to select and articulate. There is certainly no consensus among thinkers that this is what happens, but there is some evidence for believing, as Dumas did, that it does happen. In "[I] hear with my tongue," Dumas asserts that the language you speak is a way of defining yourself within a group.

The language of the Black community, as with that of any other group, takes its form, its imagery, its vocabulary, because Black people want them that way. Language can protect, exclude, express value, as well as assert identity. That is why Dumas' language is the  way it is. In the rhythm of it, is the act, the unique manner of perception of a Black man.

Dumas found his rhythm of perception (let's call it0 most readily, as others have, in music. And he brooded a lot about musical structure. the blues and gospel music, particularly, were his life breath. Only Langston Hughes knew more, or at least as much, about gospel and gospel singers. Dumas haunted concerts, photographing, when he could, the singers and the action. For him, the songs and the style of the singers linked him to the land, pinpointed that sense of dispossession that he felt, living in the alien, crass and prejudiced cities, where too many people ignored what he was as a Black man, and too few cared enough to learn or honor him because of it.

He wrote poems, not to but for the singers, even though he realized that they would probably never see them. In "Kef 25," he celebrates his favorite group, The Swan Silvertones, and joins them, and himself, to their African past, to, in other words, their present. His singers have the wisdom of African priests. The music is more than gospel; it is the mythic gesture and indicative of a social structure. Music seemed to Dumas to be able to carry the burden of direct participation in the act of living, as no poem, that was not musically structured, could. Dumas was searching for an analogous structure for poetry. Where music seemed capable of shifting, in rhythm and intensity, and coming at life from various points of view, within the same composition, poetry seemed to him static, too committed to working in one direction. Dumas tried to break that because he wanted the poem to be able to carry the past, as well as the present and future, and because he wanted to write longer poems that would do just that.

His long poems in this book, "Genesis on an Endless Mosaic" and "The Zebra Goes Wild," for example, are attempts at this musical structure.

But, of course, Dumas wouldn't be contained that easily, working along one line. he could write with a verbal intensity, in the manner of Nicolas Guillen, the Afro-Cuban poet, in "Ngoma"; with the humor of his blues songs and "My Little Boy"; with the tenderness of "Asali" and "all the letters i have written to you"; with the rage of "Cuttin Down to Size," or the political bite of "Mosaic Harlem." And his language is always appropriate:

and

and

There is no "tone" in Dumas, in the sense that publishers speak of tone, asking the poet to be one thing, to speak in one voice, to limit his perceptions and language so that they can be easily handled, codified, and dismissed. Dumas was more than that, and more poet. He wanted to be everything, to participate intenseley in whatever was humane and good, to preserve and express "our precious tradition," at this time, in this place. he was very angry and very proud. he wanted, if he couldn't get its love, the world's respect. For he would make and present his love in Poetry for My People.

And that meant that he would try everything. he would rage against those who would not or could not see the beauty of his people. he would rage against his people when they failed him in aspiration. he would speak to them, and to himself, in love.

Neither would Henry Dumas.

July 11, 1969