January 7 was the 33rd anniversary of the suicide of John Berryman. As Robert Lacy writes in an essay for Poetry Daily, “Art Hitman, a carpenter employed by the university, was on the bridge at the time and saw what happened. ‘He jumped up on the railing, sat down and quickly leaned forward,’ Hitman told the Minneapolis Tribune. ‘He never looked back at all.’ Hitman’s account, which appeared the next morning, January 8, on the front page of the Tribune, sounds very authoritative. But another eyewitness, a campus police spokesman, as reported in the afternoon Minneapolis Star on January 7, said that Berryman ‘waved goodbye’ to him before he jumped. So: a mystery, and a contradiction. Did he look back or didn’t he? Did he wave goodbye or not?”