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ESSAYS - August 2026: Triston Dabney, Marvin Garbeh Davis, Sr., Patrick Johnston
Triston Dabney
A Black Gay Utopia, Interrupted
Author: Triston Dabney
Abstract:
This essay examines Black ballroom culture as a historically necessary survival institution that has struggled to evolve beyond the crisis that produced it. Drawing on Black studies, queer theory, and political economy, I argue that ballroom emerged not merely as subculture or spectacle but as an alternative infrastructure of kinship, care, and refuge for Black and brown queer youth displaced by racialized homophobia and familial rejection. While ballroom once functioned as a utopian horizon—offering belonging, visibility, and collective survival—it now risks reproducing the very logics of competition, disposability, and aesthetic hierarchy it sought to resist. Through a critique of house structures, competitive categories, and the narrowing of “safe space” to nightlife and erotic validation, the essay interrogates the limits of pleasure-based refuge absent material support. Situating ballroom alongside Black traditions of mutual aid and collective responsibility, the essay calls for a reimagining of ballroom not as a site of nostalgia but as a political project capable of sustaining Black queer life beyond survival and toward collective flourishing.
Keywords:
Black ballroom culture; Black queer studies; queer kinship; political economy; mutual aid; queer utopia; institutional critique
When I think of Black ballroom culture, I think of its early form of refuge rather than spectacle or dazzlement. I think of rooms carved out of abandonment, of young Black and brown queer people making kin out of necessity. Ballroom did not emerge as entertainment; it emerged as shelter. It was a counter-world formed in the shadow of racial exclusion, religious rejection, and familial expulsion. For those disowned for their queerness, the house became a beautiful substitute for the family that could not hold them. To walk a category was to be seen in a world that otherwise rendered you invisible.
Ballroom, in this sense, was a Black gay utopia—not perfect, but imagined against the violences of the white heteronormative world. José Esteban Muñoz describes queer utopia not as a destination but as a horizon: a space of possibility glimpsed through performance, collectivity, and refusal (Muñoz 2009). Ballroom functioned precisely this way. It offered what dominant society denied: belonging, affirmation, a language of beauty shaped by Black and queer desire rather than white respectability. Houses named themselves as lineages, not brands. Mothers and fathers were not symbolic titles but survival roles. This was not about glamour; it was about staying alive.
And yet, when I look at ballroom now, I find myself unnerved at what it could still become. Not because it has failed, but because it has stalled. The utopian impulse that once animated ballroom has narrowed into repetition. The refuge has become a routine. What once functioned as an infrastructure of care now too often survives as a spectacle of desire.
One of the first fractures appears at the level of the house itself. Houses claim kinship but rarely possess collective resources. Members fund their own costumes, their own travel, their own survival. There is no shared budget, no dues system, no economic pooling that might allow a house to function as more than symbolic family. This absence is striking when placed alongside Black histories of mutual aid, from fraternal orders to church-based societies that understood belonging as inseparable from material obligation (Gordon Nembhard 2014). It is not my call for ballroom to leave its informal, inclusive structure but rather one formed based around political economy.
If ballroom houses were created to support youth rejected by their families, why do they lack the infrastructure to do so now? What does it mean to call something a house when there is no rent paid, no food shared, no shelter guaranteed? As Hortense Spillers reminds us, Black kinship has long been shaped by rupture—by forced separation, displacement, and improvisation (Spillers 1987). Ballroom once answered this rupture with care. Today, too often, it answers it with symbolism alone. I argue that ballroom might be reimagined as a site capable of producing material conditions of economic and social advancement for its members—through housing stipends, collective dues, access to social workers, and systems of care that function less like symbolic kinship and more like clinics, cooperatives, or community institutions.
Historically, houses emerged in response to crisis. Black and brown queer teenagers were kicked out of their homes and found safety with one another. Ballroom was not simply a space to perform—it was a response to homelessness, violence, and erasure (Bailey 2013). In its contemporary form, however, ballroom often asks its members to invest endlessly in appearance without returning the kind of care that sustains life beyond the night. The house becomes a name you walk under, not a structure that holds you.
This logic extends into competition itself. Ballroom categories promise recognition, but they also rehearse hierarchies. Best face. Best body. Realness. These categories, while once radical acts of self-definition, now risk mirroring the very systems they were meant to subvert. They train participants to submit their worth to evaluation, to be ranked, to be consumed. Even in a space built as a refuge from whiteness, white supremacist aesthetics of beauty and value quietly reassert themselves.
Scholars have long noted that “realness” operates as both critique and constraint—allowing marginalized subjects to inhabit dominant ideals while simultaneously reinscribing them (Butler 1993; Bailey 2013). Ballroom critiques the outside world by mimicking it—but mimicry can harden into worship. The language of competition begins to replace the language of care. Desire becomes currency. Validation becomes scarce.
Ballroom is often defended as a safe space for Black gay men and queer people—a place to gather beyond the constraints of white gay culture and heteronormativity. Yet safe spaces must be evaluated not only by their atmosphere, but by their function. Safe from what, and toward what end? My concern here is not meant to dismiss the extensive informal labor Black and brown community members have long invested in caring for one another. Rather, it is to ask how such labor might be extended beyond symbolic affirmation toward material practices of mutual aid, collective responsibility, and institutional care—forms of support less tethered to nightlife economies and more attuned to the long-term conditions of Black queer survival.
We already have clubs. We already have parties. We already have digital economies of desire that promise intimacy and deliver repetition. What we do not have are Black gay libraries. Black gay churches that do not demand silence or respectability. Black gay community spaces not tethered to nightlife or alcohol. Cathy Cohen reminds us that queer politics loses its radical potential when it narrows itself to identity expression rather than structural transformation (Cohen 1997). Ballroom risks this narrowing when pleasure becomes its sole political horizon.
Without alternative institutions, Black queer life becomes trapped in a loop—weekend release followed by weekday exhaustion. Ballroom becomes a pause, not a pathway. Jonathan Crary writes that late capitalism thrives on cycles of stimulation and depletion, offering temporary relief rather than lasting repair (Crary 2013). Ballroom, when stripped of its infrastructural ambitions, risks functioning the same way: a sanctioned escape that leaves the conditions of exhaustion untouched.
This is not an argument against pleasure, sex, or beauty. It is an argument against their confinement. When pleasure becomes the only form of freedom available, it collapses under the weight of expectation. When community is organized solely around attraction, those who age, tire, or refuse desirability are quietly displaced. The utopia shrinks. In this essay, I ask the question: what happens after we survive. How do we adapt and change to meet the needs of our current neoliberal conditions?
In recent years, ballroom culture has received heightened public recognition through popular music—such as Beyoncé’s Break My Soul—and television, most notably FX’s Pose. Ballroom language, aesthetics, and performance logics now circulate widely across social media and mainstream culture, with phrases such as “clock it” entering popular vernacular. Yet increased visibility does not necessarily translate into increased care. Recognition alone cannot substitute for the material conditions required to sustain life.
Indeed, the risk of visibility without infrastructure is that celebration becomes mistaken for transformation. When cultural affirmation replaces institutional accountability, the underlying conditions of precarity remain intact. In this moment, ballroom risks being praised for its aesthetics while relieved of its original responsibility to shelter those most vulnerable within it. The task, then, is not merely to celebrate ballroom’s influence, but to ask how its cultural power might be redirected toward durable forms of support, governance, and collective responsibility. Without such a shift, visibility threatens to become another form of containment—one that honors survival while postponing the work of collective flourishing.
What would it mean for ballroom to imagine itself differently again? What would a house look like with dues, stipends, housing pipelines, and organized mental health care? What would happen if competition was occasional rather than central? If mentorship mattered as much as trophies? If care replaced crowns as the highest honor?
Ballroom deserves more than nostalgia. It deserves the courage to evolve. And Black queer people deserve more than a temporary escape from the world that exhausts us. We deserve institutions, not just events. Structures, not just stages. A utopia not interrupted by its own limits. It is a question that must be asked of all black survival institutions once they outlive the crisis under which they were originally created. The truth: No institution built for emergency can substitute indefinitely for a world that refuses to sustain us.
Ballroom once taught us how to survive. The question now is whether it can teach us how to live again.
Works Cited
Author: Triston Dabney
Abstract:
This essay examines Black ballroom culture as a historically necessary survival institution that has struggled to evolve beyond the crisis that produced it. Drawing on Black studies, queer theory, and political economy, I argue that ballroom emerged not merely as subculture or spectacle but as an alternative infrastructure of kinship, care, and refuge for Black and brown queer youth displaced by racialized homophobia and familial rejection. While ballroom once functioned as a utopian horizon—offering belonging, visibility, and collective survival—it now risks reproducing the very logics of competition, disposability, and aesthetic hierarchy it sought to resist. Through a critique of house structures, competitive categories, and the narrowing of “safe space” to nightlife and erotic validation, the essay interrogates the limits of pleasure-based refuge absent material support. Situating ballroom alongside Black traditions of mutual aid and collective responsibility, the essay calls for a reimagining of ballroom not as a site of nostalgia but as a political project capable of sustaining Black queer life beyond survival and toward collective flourishing.
Keywords:
Black ballroom culture; Black queer studies; queer kinship; political economy; mutual aid; queer utopia; institutional critique
When I think of Black ballroom culture, I think of its early form of refuge rather than spectacle or dazzlement. I think of rooms carved out of abandonment, of young Black and brown queer people making kin out of necessity. Ballroom did not emerge as entertainment; it emerged as shelter. It was a counter-world formed in the shadow of racial exclusion, religious rejection, and familial expulsion. For those disowned for their queerness, the house became a beautiful substitute for the family that could not hold them. To walk a category was to be seen in a world that otherwise rendered you invisible.
Ballroom, in this sense, was a Black gay utopia—not perfect, but imagined against the violences of the white heteronormative world. José Esteban Muñoz describes queer utopia not as a destination but as a horizon: a space of possibility glimpsed through performance, collectivity, and refusal (Muñoz 2009). Ballroom functioned precisely this way. It offered what dominant society denied: belonging, affirmation, a language of beauty shaped by Black and queer desire rather than white respectability. Houses named themselves as lineages, not brands. Mothers and fathers were not symbolic titles but survival roles. This was not about glamour; it was about staying alive.
And yet, when I look at ballroom now, I find myself unnerved at what it could still become. Not because it has failed, but because it has stalled. The utopian impulse that once animated ballroom has narrowed into repetition. The refuge has become a routine. What once functioned as an infrastructure of care now too often survives as a spectacle of desire.
One of the first fractures appears at the level of the house itself. Houses claim kinship but rarely possess collective resources. Members fund their own costumes, their own travel, their own survival. There is no shared budget, no dues system, no economic pooling that might allow a house to function as more than symbolic family. This absence is striking when placed alongside Black histories of mutual aid, from fraternal orders to church-based societies that understood belonging as inseparable from material obligation (Gordon Nembhard 2014). It is not my call for ballroom to leave its informal, inclusive structure but rather one formed based around political economy.
If ballroom houses were created to support youth rejected by their families, why do they lack the infrastructure to do so now? What does it mean to call something a house when there is no rent paid, no food shared, no shelter guaranteed? As Hortense Spillers reminds us, Black kinship has long been shaped by rupture—by forced separation, displacement, and improvisation (Spillers 1987). Ballroom once answered this rupture with care. Today, too often, it answers it with symbolism alone. I argue that ballroom might be reimagined as a site capable of producing material conditions of economic and social advancement for its members—through housing stipends, collective dues, access to social workers, and systems of care that function less like symbolic kinship and more like clinics, cooperatives, or community institutions.
Historically, houses emerged in response to crisis. Black and brown queer teenagers were kicked out of their homes and found safety with one another. Ballroom was not simply a space to perform—it was a response to homelessness, violence, and erasure (Bailey 2013). In its contemporary form, however, ballroom often asks its members to invest endlessly in appearance without returning the kind of care that sustains life beyond the night. The house becomes a name you walk under, not a structure that holds you.
This logic extends into competition itself. Ballroom categories promise recognition, but they also rehearse hierarchies. Best face. Best body. Realness. These categories, while once radical acts of self-definition, now risk mirroring the very systems they were meant to subvert. They train participants to submit their worth to evaluation, to be ranked, to be consumed. Even in a space built as a refuge from whiteness, white supremacist aesthetics of beauty and value quietly reassert themselves.
Scholars have long noted that “realness” operates as both critique and constraint—allowing marginalized subjects to inhabit dominant ideals while simultaneously reinscribing them (Butler 1993; Bailey 2013). Ballroom critiques the outside world by mimicking it—but mimicry can harden into worship. The language of competition begins to replace the language of care. Desire becomes currency. Validation becomes scarce.
Ballroom is often defended as a safe space for Black gay men and queer people—a place to gather beyond the constraints of white gay culture and heteronormativity. Yet safe spaces must be evaluated not only by their atmosphere, but by their function. Safe from what, and toward what end? My concern here is not meant to dismiss the extensive informal labor Black and brown community members have long invested in caring for one another. Rather, it is to ask how such labor might be extended beyond symbolic affirmation toward material practices of mutual aid, collective responsibility, and institutional care—forms of support less tethered to nightlife economies and more attuned to the long-term conditions of Black queer survival.
We already have clubs. We already have parties. We already have digital economies of desire that promise intimacy and deliver repetition. What we do not have are Black gay libraries. Black gay churches that do not demand silence or respectability. Black gay community spaces not tethered to nightlife or alcohol. Cathy Cohen reminds us that queer politics loses its radical potential when it narrows itself to identity expression rather than structural transformation (Cohen 1997). Ballroom risks this narrowing when pleasure becomes its sole political horizon.
Without alternative institutions, Black queer life becomes trapped in a loop—weekend release followed by weekday exhaustion. Ballroom becomes a pause, not a pathway. Jonathan Crary writes that late capitalism thrives on cycles of stimulation and depletion, offering temporary relief rather than lasting repair (Crary 2013). Ballroom, when stripped of its infrastructural ambitions, risks functioning the same way: a sanctioned escape that leaves the conditions of exhaustion untouched.
This is not an argument against pleasure, sex, or beauty. It is an argument against their confinement. When pleasure becomes the only form of freedom available, it collapses under the weight of expectation. When community is organized solely around attraction, those who age, tire, or refuse desirability are quietly displaced. The utopia shrinks. In this essay, I ask the question: what happens after we survive. How do we adapt and change to meet the needs of our current neoliberal conditions?
In recent years, ballroom culture has received heightened public recognition through popular music—such as Beyoncé’s Break My Soul—and television, most notably FX’s Pose. Ballroom language, aesthetics, and performance logics now circulate widely across social media and mainstream culture, with phrases such as “clock it” entering popular vernacular. Yet increased visibility does not necessarily translate into increased care. Recognition alone cannot substitute for the material conditions required to sustain life.
Indeed, the risk of visibility without infrastructure is that celebration becomes mistaken for transformation. When cultural affirmation replaces institutional accountability, the underlying conditions of precarity remain intact. In this moment, ballroom risks being praised for its aesthetics while relieved of its original responsibility to shelter those most vulnerable within it. The task, then, is not merely to celebrate ballroom’s influence, but to ask how its cultural power might be redirected toward durable forms of support, governance, and collective responsibility. Without such a shift, visibility threatens to become another form of containment—one that honors survival while postponing the work of collective flourishing.
What would it mean for ballroom to imagine itself differently again? What would a house look like with dues, stipends, housing pipelines, and organized mental health care? What would happen if competition was occasional rather than central? If mentorship mattered as much as trophies? If care replaced crowns as the highest honor?
Ballroom deserves more than nostalgia. It deserves the courage to evolve. And Black queer people deserve more than a temporary escape from the world that exhausts us. We deserve institutions, not just events. Structures, not just stages. A utopia not interrupted by its own limits. It is a question that must be asked of all black survival institutions once they outlive the crisis under which they were originally created. The truth: No institution built for emergency can substitute indefinitely for a world that refuses to sustain us.
Ballroom once taught us how to survive. The question now is whether it can teach us how to live again.
Works Cited
- Bailey, Marlon M. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. University of Michigan Press, 2013.
- Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1993.
- Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ, vol. 3, no. 4, 1997, pp. 437–465.
- Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso, 2013.
- Gordon Nembhard, Jessica. Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Penn State University Press, 2014.
- Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009.
- Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–81.
Triston Dabney is a poet and essayist interested in tenderness as a way of living and thinking. His work explores Black and queer life, memory, faith, and responsibility, often focusing on the small gestures through which care is practiced and inherited. He writes toward endurance rather than urgency, and toward love as an ethical act.His debut collection, Moments as They Are (Fernwood Press, 2026), traces a journey through boyhood, memory, spirituality, and survival with lyrical precision and radical tenderness.
Marvin Garbeh Davis, Sr.
The Architecture of Disappearance
By Marvin Garbeh Davis, Sr.
The Atlantic Ocean does not enter a coastal neighborhood like a sudden, dramatic thief; it enters like a slow, meticulous landlord reclaiming a debt. Along the fringes of Monrovia, where the land grows thin and the soil turns to loose, grey sugar, the water has stopped negotiating. It comes at midnight, during the high spring tides, under a sky the color of charcoal. It slides beneath the foundations of zinc-roofed houses, gently dissolving the red clay bricks, until a man wakes up to find that his living room floor has become a beach, and the sea is licking the legs of his wooden chairs.
We live in a geography of shrinking perimeters. My neighbor, an old carpenter named Joseph, used to say that the coast has a memory like an iron safe, but the water has a key that fits every lock. Ten years ago, Joseph’s house sat three hundred yards back from the high-water mark, protected by a thick grove of coconut palms and a wide stretch of communal football ground where the neighborhood boys chased plastic balls into the dusk. Today, those palms are dead stumps, their roots exposed to the salt like bleached ribs, and the football ground belongs entirely to the sharks.
Last Tuesday, the water took Joseph’s second door. It was the door that led out to his small backyard veranda—the place where he used to plane rough planks of cotton-tree wood and listen to the radio. I stood with him on the remaining lip of his concrete foundation as the afternoon tide came rushing in. The water didn't crash; it simply swelled, heavy and green, lifting the discarded frame of his old wooden doorway and carrying it out past the breakwater. We watched it bobbing on the surf like a coffin lid.
"The Atlantic never forgets a line it used to hold," Joseph whispered, his eyes locked on the horizon where a rusted cargo ship sat anchored in the grey mist. "It took the well last Christmas. It took the kitchen in March. Now it wants the place where I sleep."
But in the heavy choke of the June rainy season, the betrayal does not only come from the sea. The siege is total. While the Atlantic hammers from the front, the city’s internal arteries turn against us from behind. The concrete gutters, the narrow dirt alleys, and the open drainage channels are overwhelmed, swelling into sluggish, toxic lakes.
The water here does not drain; it backs up, choked by the debris of urban survival. Thousands of discarded plastic bottles, faded blue ice-cream cups, torn sandals, and Styrofoam takeaway boxes are vomited back up by the earth, floating in a thick, stagnant soup that pools between our doorsteps. The trash of the city is trapped here, circling endlessly in the alleys, unable to find an exit to the sea. It sits under the heavy downpour, fermenting, a floating archive of everything Monrovia has consumed and cast aside.
Inside the zinc shacks, the dampness breeds a quiet, hollow hunger. When the rain falls for three days straight without a break, the charcoal fire cannot light. The matches are damp, the wood is soaked, and the stomach begins its familiar, mathematical calculation. Money is an endangered currency here. On the street corner, a vendor sells cheap Chinese umbrellas for five hundred dollars, their thin plastic ribs gleaming under the grey sky. But five hundred dollars is two days of farina and dried fish for a household. You cannot eat an umbrella. So you make the trade-off. You leave your head bare to the downpour, letting the cold water saturate your clothes to the skin, because the body must be fed before it can be covered.
Survival in this climate demands a brutal physical price. Yesterday, the text message arrived—a brief, flickering lifeline on a battery-drained phone. A friend, a civil servant who had finally seen his government stipend cleared after months of bureaucratic silence, promised he had five thousand dollars waiting for me if I could make it to his office in Central Monrovia.
To get to that promise, you do not walk; you wade. The main alley leading out to the bypass had vanished beneath four feet of black, swirling runoff. There was no maneuvering around it. I stepped off the dry edge of the concrete doorstep and felt the water rise immediately past my knees, then to my thighs, until the filthy current was swirling around my waist.
The water is heavy, pushing against your legs like a physical hand trying to turn you back. You walk blindly, your feet searching through the unseen mud for open manholes, jagged pieces of zinc, or submerged cinderblocks. Every step is an act of faith. Around you, other men and women are moving through the same dark soup, their shoes held high above their heads, their faces set in the grim, unblinking mask of the urban trek. You push forward through the floating plastic bottles and the cold sting of the rain because the promise of a civil servant is a fragile thing that expires the moment the office doors close for the weekend.
Yet, the cruelest part of this architecture is not the water, but the collective amnesia that follows it.
When the clouds finally part and the fierce, blinding heat of the dry season returns, the landscape hardens, and so do our minds. The red mud bakes into dust. The ocean retreats a few polite paces, lazily lapping at the shore as if it never meant any harm. And just like that, we forget.
A general anesthesia settles over the neighborhoods. In December, when heavy rubber rainboots sit cheap and ignored in the market stalls, nobody buys them. We don't mend the rusted zinc roofs while the sun is out; we don't patch the leaks or reinforce the collapsing brickwork. Instead, we treat the dry season as a permanent truce. We even begin to fill the gutters with dirt and sweepings again, plugging up the very vents that will drown us in six months' time. We live entirely in the immediate present, erasing the memory of the waist-deep current because the human mind cannot survive if it must constantly contemplate its own sinking.
We have become experts in the art of dismantling our own lives before the water can claim them, only to rebuild them with the same flawed materials when the sun comes out. We are a people defined by a relentless, stubborn choreography of retreat and return. The foreign maps say the country is fixed, but our borders are liquid, rewritten every six hours by the pulse of the moon, the blockage of a drainage pipe, and the short memory of our own hearts. We sleep with our ears tuned to the changing pitch of the surf and the steady drumbeat on the zinc above, knowing that the very ground beneath our pillows is an illusion, a temporary gift from an executioner who is simply waiting for us to forget again.
By Marvin Garbeh Davis, Sr.
The Atlantic Ocean does not enter a coastal neighborhood like a sudden, dramatic thief; it enters like a slow, meticulous landlord reclaiming a debt. Along the fringes of Monrovia, where the land grows thin and the soil turns to loose, grey sugar, the water has stopped negotiating. It comes at midnight, during the high spring tides, under a sky the color of charcoal. It slides beneath the foundations of zinc-roofed houses, gently dissolving the red clay bricks, until a man wakes up to find that his living room floor has become a beach, and the sea is licking the legs of his wooden chairs.
We live in a geography of shrinking perimeters. My neighbor, an old carpenter named Joseph, used to say that the coast has a memory like an iron safe, but the water has a key that fits every lock. Ten years ago, Joseph’s house sat three hundred yards back from the high-water mark, protected by a thick grove of coconut palms and a wide stretch of communal football ground where the neighborhood boys chased plastic balls into the dusk. Today, those palms are dead stumps, their roots exposed to the salt like bleached ribs, and the football ground belongs entirely to the sharks.
Last Tuesday, the water took Joseph’s second door. It was the door that led out to his small backyard veranda—the place where he used to plane rough planks of cotton-tree wood and listen to the radio. I stood with him on the remaining lip of his concrete foundation as the afternoon tide came rushing in. The water didn't crash; it simply swelled, heavy and green, lifting the discarded frame of his old wooden doorway and carrying it out past the breakwater. We watched it bobbing on the surf like a coffin lid.
"The Atlantic never forgets a line it used to hold," Joseph whispered, his eyes locked on the horizon where a rusted cargo ship sat anchored in the grey mist. "It took the well last Christmas. It took the kitchen in March. Now it wants the place where I sleep."
But in the heavy choke of the June rainy season, the betrayal does not only come from the sea. The siege is total. While the Atlantic hammers from the front, the city’s internal arteries turn against us from behind. The concrete gutters, the narrow dirt alleys, and the open drainage channels are overwhelmed, swelling into sluggish, toxic lakes.
The water here does not drain; it backs up, choked by the debris of urban survival. Thousands of discarded plastic bottles, faded blue ice-cream cups, torn sandals, and Styrofoam takeaway boxes are vomited back up by the earth, floating in a thick, stagnant soup that pools between our doorsteps. The trash of the city is trapped here, circling endlessly in the alleys, unable to find an exit to the sea. It sits under the heavy downpour, fermenting, a floating archive of everything Monrovia has consumed and cast aside.
Inside the zinc shacks, the dampness breeds a quiet, hollow hunger. When the rain falls for three days straight without a break, the charcoal fire cannot light. The matches are damp, the wood is soaked, and the stomach begins its familiar, mathematical calculation. Money is an endangered currency here. On the street corner, a vendor sells cheap Chinese umbrellas for five hundred dollars, their thin plastic ribs gleaming under the grey sky. But five hundred dollars is two days of farina and dried fish for a household. You cannot eat an umbrella. So you make the trade-off. You leave your head bare to the downpour, letting the cold water saturate your clothes to the skin, because the body must be fed before it can be covered.
Survival in this climate demands a brutal physical price. Yesterday, the text message arrived—a brief, flickering lifeline on a battery-drained phone. A friend, a civil servant who had finally seen his government stipend cleared after months of bureaucratic silence, promised he had five thousand dollars waiting for me if I could make it to his office in Central Monrovia.
To get to that promise, you do not walk; you wade. The main alley leading out to the bypass had vanished beneath four feet of black, swirling runoff. There was no maneuvering around it. I stepped off the dry edge of the concrete doorstep and felt the water rise immediately past my knees, then to my thighs, until the filthy current was swirling around my waist.
The water is heavy, pushing against your legs like a physical hand trying to turn you back. You walk blindly, your feet searching through the unseen mud for open manholes, jagged pieces of zinc, or submerged cinderblocks. Every step is an act of faith. Around you, other men and women are moving through the same dark soup, their shoes held high above their heads, their faces set in the grim, unblinking mask of the urban trek. You push forward through the floating plastic bottles and the cold sting of the rain because the promise of a civil servant is a fragile thing that expires the moment the office doors close for the weekend.
Yet, the cruelest part of this architecture is not the water, but the collective amnesia that follows it.
When the clouds finally part and the fierce, blinding heat of the dry season returns, the landscape hardens, and so do our minds. The red mud bakes into dust. The ocean retreats a few polite paces, lazily lapping at the shore as if it never meant any harm. And just like that, we forget.
A general anesthesia settles over the neighborhoods. In December, when heavy rubber rainboots sit cheap and ignored in the market stalls, nobody buys them. We don't mend the rusted zinc roofs while the sun is out; we don't patch the leaks or reinforce the collapsing brickwork. Instead, we treat the dry season as a permanent truce. We even begin to fill the gutters with dirt and sweepings again, plugging up the very vents that will drown us in six months' time. We live entirely in the immediate present, erasing the memory of the waist-deep current because the human mind cannot survive if it must constantly contemplate its own sinking.
We have become experts in the art of dismantling our own lives before the water can claim them, only to rebuild them with the same flawed materials when the sun comes out. We are a people defined by a relentless, stubborn choreography of retreat and return. The foreign maps say the country is fixed, but our borders are liquid, rewritten every six hours by the pulse of the moon, the blockage of a drainage pipe, and the short memory of our own hearts. We sleep with our ears tuned to the changing pitch of the surf and the steady drumbeat on the zinc above, knowing that the very ground beneath our pillows is an illusion, a temporary gift from an executioner who is simply waiting for us to forget again.
Marvin Garbeh Davis, Sr. is a Liberian writer, poet, and pastor whose work explores place, memory, faith, and survival in West Africa. Rooted in the lived landscapes of rubber plantations, rural villages, and the resilient urban communities of Monrovia, his writing documents ordinary lives shaped by extraordinary histories. His writings have appeared in Barrelhouse, Deadlands, Terrain.org, and other publications. He is the author of the novel Man, Rubber and the Devil and lives with his wife, Angea, in Liberia.
Patrick Johnston
there was a man
Grandpa Vincey, over in Ireland, was grandfather to my wife. And, when I met him, Grandpa Vincey was old. And seemed as though he always had been, although to be sure, he had a lifetime of stories behind him. And it was Vincey who got me thinking about how stories get lost…
Vincey was a temperate man, with no vices. At the age of 80 the Catholic church honoured him with a medal in celebration of a lifetime of abstinence from alcohol whether grape or grain. The ‘lifetime’ was a very minor liberty with the truth, since on the eve of his 18th birthday he had partaken blithely of the spirit and awoken the next day with such a fierce head that he foreswore that day forth never again should a drop pass his lips. And good to his word, he was, thereafter. He had smoked tobacco for a good portion of his adult life but that, in those days, was considered the most minor of affronts to the Lord. He was courteous in his dealings with his wife and was never swift to take the strap to his many children.
There is much magic in nature. Generally, in the things of men, there is less magic. There is magic in music. There is magic in dance. In art and in sculpture. There is magic in ritual. There is magic in the crafting of things. There is magic perhaps in the written word. All these things may speak directly to the inner worlds of others, and in doing so can change their worlds. There is magic too in the spoken word…
Vincey’s speech waxed poetic in the old manner of his people. I remember a joke he once told me. As a joke it was average at best, but I will recount it here since all stories deserve a second chance at life. I remember it though not for its content, but for the manner of its telling.
There was a man, and many a grave mishap had befallen him, so that he was all at a loss, and he found himself doubting in the Lord. And so, to the Priest he went.
And he said to the Priest ‘Father, I fear that I have lost my faith in the Lord’.
‘You have lost God, you say?’ Asked the Priest. ‘You have lost God? Then we shall have to help you find him again’, said he and with great fury he took the man by the head and thrust him down into the water of the Chapel font. The man came up spluttering and the Priest asked him ‘Have you found him?’ – ‘No Father’ replied the man. And again, the Priest thrust his head down into the water, and there he held him, and held him, until almost dead he was, for the want of air.
Finally letting him up to breathe, ‘Have you found him yet?’ asked the Priest.
‘To be sure Father”, says the man gasping for breath, “I don’t think that he’s down there…”
**
Grandpa Vincey was a fine storyteller, though his stories tended towards a somewhat repetitive thematic unity. It was entertaining enough, to the listener, and in some ways increasingly so as time went on, by merit of its thematic doggedness. Nearly all his stories were about death.
A man died… A woman died…
A man died who was full of life, and a full life he had lived…
Another man died after soon coming into some money which was the inheritance of his uncle on the mother’s side. Such ambitions he had harboured, but the only benefit he had from the money was the buying of his own casket.
A man worked all the live long day and dropped dead as a stone at the party that was for celebrating his own retirement.
Your man died there by the lamppost. Murder it was. The Loyalists, it was, that done for him. And there in the alley, another man died. Shot he was, for the taking of vengeance. The Republicans. And there’s justice was done, they said.
A man died and we searched through his trouser pockets for his keys for to open up the house and take the childers inside. There was blood in his pockets. And there was blood on the keys. We got blood all on our hands. There was blood on all our hands…
Billy McGinty, who worked at the factory. Betrayed he was by his wife, with another man. And the other man was his own brother no less. I’ll show they, says he. And he goes to his shed, and he takes a hold of the canister, and he drinks of the poison within. It was weedkiller. The whole lot of it he drank... burned from the inside, he was. Burned from the inside!
**
The year is 2006.
The house where Vincey spent most of his working life, and also his retirement thanks to the grace and favour of the furniture makers for whom he had worked, guarded the alley to the factory yard which sat, begated, behind the row of houses. During his working life the house was a privilege of his role as Factory Superintendent. When he retired from this position, the newly appointed Factory Manager had a house of his own in a new estate at the edge of town, and it suited the owners to let Vincey retain residence for a peppercorn rent, so as to have a friendly eye on the site outside of hours.
The location of this house may, if not having been the cause of Vincey’s preoccupation with death, at least have been an itch to the incipient predisposition to dwell on such things. Directly across the road from the Obin Street house was the premises of an undertaker. And perhaps no less than three hundred yards down the road was the cemetery in which many of the undertaker’s clients found their long rest beneath the sod. So, for Vincey, even in the prime of his days, death was never too far away. ‘Who will you be taking down to field today then?’ He would shout across from his door as he collected the milk or chased his children off towards school. ‘Who will it be today?’. And although in the early days it was the names of strangers that were called back to him, or the grandparents or parents of people he knew, as the years passed, the names he heard more and more became the names of acquaintances, colleagues, and friends of his own generation.
And in time the dead outnumbered the living.
When his wife, Rosaleen, passed, and took her place in the field down the road, Vincey would tarry there awhile in the evening. A couple of friends and acquaintances who had lost their wives too might be there. They would nod hello and perhaps stop to pass the time of day a small while. And in time they came together and made a club of sorts - the Graveyard Comedians. They would meet, generally on a Tuesday evening, for an hour or so - come rain or shine - and salve the loneliness of old men by swapping jokes and gossip and remembering their wives and friends. They might take a flask of tea. In time they built a leaning post from the remains of an old altar. With the priests blessing of course. Vincey would always take a bag of boiled sweets. They would lean at the post sipping tea and tell their stories. Graveyard comedians.
It was in this period of his life that I met Grandpa Vincey. He was the grandfather of my wife, Jude. She would later become the mother of my children, although at the time we were not yet wed and there were no children yet. We visited Vincey whilst taking some holidays. Jude wanted to show me where she was born and grew up, and to meet her family, and so we flew into Dublin, hired a car, and spent a couple of weeks driving around, visiting places remembered from her childhood. In the North, we stayed at Vincey’s place, with the dual reasoning that he both had the space in his house in Obin Street, and that staying with him forestalled the possibility of causing political upheavals that might result of accepting the invitation of one uncle or aunt in preference to another.
Although the Obin Street house was spacious, Vincey constrained his domain to just three rooms. Bathroom, bedroom, and back kitchen. The kitchen was tiny, but housed an old iron stove, on which a pot of tea sat in constant readiness, a small table, and a small portable tv set, and a door to the yard. Thus, Vincey’s needs accommodated. He would stand at the back door throwing crumbs to the many birds that gathered in response to his generosity. – There’s Bobby. Bobby, would you like a wee bun? And look… here’s Billy.
The Birdman of Obin Street. He hated cats.
It was a good choice, to stay at the Obin Street house, despite propriety requiring that, as unyet married, we must take separate bedrooms. Tip-tip-toe through the creak boards. Vincey was a genial host and was happy to accompany us on day trips through the surrounding towns and country sharing his knowledge of the local area’s history and customs. And sharing his stories.
It’s been a long day. We sit quietly one evening in the back kitchen sipping tea, hunched at the small table next to the stove. Me leafing through a book, Vincey watching the football with the volume turned low. And he says to me ‘Pat’ and looks me in the eye, and he says: ‘Pat… there was a man… and he had for himself a wife… and she died’. And with a small gesture of his hand and a nod of his head that says – ‘there’ - and – ‘what can you do?’ - goes back to quietly watching the television, with no indication that anything more is needed from either of us. Simply that a story has been told. Whose story, I had no way of knowing.
Grandpa Vincey, over in Ireland, was grandfather to my wife. And, when I met him, Grandpa Vincey was old. And seemed as though he always had been, although to be sure, he had a lifetime of stories behind him. And it was Vincey who got me thinking about how stories get lost…
Vincey was a temperate man, with no vices. At the age of 80 the Catholic church honoured him with a medal in celebration of a lifetime of abstinence from alcohol whether grape or grain. The ‘lifetime’ was a very minor liberty with the truth, since on the eve of his 18th birthday he had partaken blithely of the spirit and awoken the next day with such a fierce head that he foreswore that day forth never again should a drop pass his lips. And good to his word, he was, thereafter. He had smoked tobacco for a good portion of his adult life but that, in those days, was considered the most minor of affronts to the Lord. He was courteous in his dealings with his wife and was never swift to take the strap to his many children.
There is much magic in nature. Generally, in the things of men, there is less magic. There is magic in music. There is magic in dance. In art and in sculpture. There is magic in ritual. There is magic in the crafting of things. There is magic perhaps in the written word. All these things may speak directly to the inner worlds of others, and in doing so can change their worlds. There is magic too in the spoken word…
Vincey’s speech waxed poetic in the old manner of his people. I remember a joke he once told me. As a joke it was average at best, but I will recount it here since all stories deserve a second chance at life. I remember it though not for its content, but for the manner of its telling.
There was a man, and many a grave mishap had befallen him, so that he was all at a loss, and he found himself doubting in the Lord. And so, to the Priest he went.
And he said to the Priest ‘Father, I fear that I have lost my faith in the Lord’.
‘You have lost God, you say?’ Asked the Priest. ‘You have lost God? Then we shall have to help you find him again’, said he and with great fury he took the man by the head and thrust him down into the water of the Chapel font. The man came up spluttering and the Priest asked him ‘Have you found him?’ – ‘No Father’ replied the man. And again, the Priest thrust his head down into the water, and there he held him, and held him, until almost dead he was, for the want of air.
Finally letting him up to breathe, ‘Have you found him yet?’ asked the Priest.
‘To be sure Father”, says the man gasping for breath, “I don’t think that he’s down there…”
**
Grandpa Vincey was a fine storyteller, though his stories tended towards a somewhat repetitive thematic unity. It was entertaining enough, to the listener, and in some ways increasingly so as time went on, by merit of its thematic doggedness. Nearly all his stories were about death.
A man died… A woman died…
A man died who was full of life, and a full life he had lived…
Another man died after soon coming into some money which was the inheritance of his uncle on the mother’s side. Such ambitions he had harboured, but the only benefit he had from the money was the buying of his own casket.
A man worked all the live long day and dropped dead as a stone at the party that was for celebrating his own retirement.
Your man died there by the lamppost. Murder it was. The Loyalists, it was, that done for him. And there in the alley, another man died. Shot he was, for the taking of vengeance. The Republicans. And there’s justice was done, they said.
A man died and we searched through his trouser pockets for his keys for to open up the house and take the childers inside. There was blood in his pockets. And there was blood on the keys. We got blood all on our hands. There was blood on all our hands…
Billy McGinty, who worked at the factory. Betrayed he was by his wife, with another man. And the other man was his own brother no less. I’ll show they, says he. And he goes to his shed, and he takes a hold of the canister, and he drinks of the poison within. It was weedkiller. The whole lot of it he drank... burned from the inside, he was. Burned from the inside!
**
The year is 2006.
The house where Vincey spent most of his working life, and also his retirement thanks to the grace and favour of the furniture makers for whom he had worked, guarded the alley to the factory yard which sat, begated, behind the row of houses. During his working life the house was a privilege of his role as Factory Superintendent. When he retired from this position, the newly appointed Factory Manager had a house of his own in a new estate at the edge of town, and it suited the owners to let Vincey retain residence for a peppercorn rent, so as to have a friendly eye on the site outside of hours.
The location of this house may, if not having been the cause of Vincey’s preoccupation with death, at least have been an itch to the incipient predisposition to dwell on such things. Directly across the road from the Obin Street house was the premises of an undertaker. And perhaps no less than three hundred yards down the road was the cemetery in which many of the undertaker’s clients found their long rest beneath the sod. So, for Vincey, even in the prime of his days, death was never too far away. ‘Who will you be taking down to field today then?’ He would shout across from his door as he collected the milk or chased his children off towards school. ‘Who will it be today?’. And although in the early days it was the names of strangers that were called back to him, or the grandparents or parents of people he knew, as the years passed, the names he heard more and more became the names of acquaintances, colleagues, and friends of his own generation.
And in time the dead outnumbered the living.
When his wife, Rosaleen, passed, and took her place in the field down the road, Vincey would tarry there awhile in the evening. A couple of friends and acquaintances who had lost their wives too might be there. They would nod hello and perhaps stop to pass the time of day a small while. And in time they came together and made a club of sorts - the Graveyard Comedians. They would meet, generally on a Tuesday evening, for an hour or so - come rain or shine - and salve the loneliness of old men by swapping jokes and gossip and remembering their wives and friends. They might take a flask of tea. In time they built a leaning post from the remains of an old altar. With the priests blessing of course. Vincey would always take a bag of boiled sweets. They would lean at the post sipping tea and tell their stories. Graveyard comedians.
It was in this period of his life that I met Grandpa Vincey. He was the grandfather of my wife, Jude. She would later become the mother of my children, although at the time we were not yet wed and there were no children yet. We visited Vincey whilst taking some holidays. Jude wanted to show me where she was born and grew up, and to meet her family, and so we flew into Dublin, hired a car, and spent a couple of weeks driving around, visiting places remembered from her childhood. In the North, we stayed at Vincey’s place, with the dual reasoning that he both had the space in his house in Obin Street, and that staying with him forestalled the possibility of causing political upheavals that might result of accepting the invitation of one uncle or aunt in preference to another.
Although the Obin Street house was spacious, Vincey constrained his domain to just three rooms. Bathroom, bedroom, and back kitchen. The kitchen was tiny, but housed an old iron stove, on which a pot of tea sat in constant readiness, a small table, and a small portable tv set, and a door to the yard. Thus, Vincey’s needs accommodated. He would stand at the back door throwing crumbs to the many birds that gathered in response to his generosity. – There’s Bobby. Bobby, would you like a wee bun? And look… here’s Billy.
The Birdman of Obin Street. He hated cats.
It was a good choice, to stay at the Obin Street house, despite propriety requiring that, as unyet married, we must take separate bedrooms. Tip-tip-toe through the creak boards. Vincey was a genial host and was happy to accompany us on day trips through the surrounding towns and country sharing his knowledge of the local area’s history and customs. And sharing his stories.
It’s been a long day. We sit quietly one evening in the back kitchen sipping tea, hunched at the small table next to the stove. Me leafing through a book, Vincey watching the football with the volume turned low. And he says to me ‘Pat’ and looks me in the eye, and he says: ‘Pat… there was a man… and he had for himself a wife… and she died’. And with a small gesture of his hand and a nod of his head that says – ‘there’ - and – ‘what can you do?’ - goes back to quietly watching the television, with no indication that anything more is needed from either of us. Simply that a story has been told. Whose story, I had no way of knowing.
Patrick Johnston is an Anglo-Australian writer and former professor of psychology and neuroscience. His work appears in The Louisville Review, Eastern Iowa Review, Thin Air Magazine, and Litro Magazine USA, among others, and has received a Pushcart Prize nomination. He is the author of the novel The Gaps Between the Stories. More at dr-patrick-johnston.com.
ESSAYS - May 2026: Sean Thomas Dougherty
Sean Thomas Dougherty
Snowlight
The old woman puts the Earle grey tea bag into the blue cup of hot water. “Your father needs help, he’s at the end of the driveway.” It is my mother-in-law calling out. My wife thinks her father has fallen, and my wife and I come running. But he’s gotten the van stuck at the end of the drive in the mound of snow the plow made. The old woman is looking out the window now. So much snow she says. She wants to call her daughter but it is so late. My wife tells her mother, “I told dad not to try to go anywhere.” Her mother says, “but we needed stamps.” “Mom it is Sunday, It is night. It is snowing.” Her mother says “We need to get the Christmas cards out in the morning.” I swear her odd enabling will be the death of him, though despite his fallacies he is still his own man. Addled but still his own. We aren’t shoveling him out. We call AAA. The snow is falling at a fast rate. It sweeps off the great lake in waves that erase the world. The old woman can still make a fire. She lives across from the cemetery in the middle of the city. She rides in a motorized wheelchair and we see each other in the mornings on our walks past the nineteenth century graves. She sips her tea, she worries she will not be able to leave the house tomorrow. My father-in-law is taking his boots off. He is flexing his cold hands. My wife wants to scold him but what is there to say? We can’t put leashes on them. We can’t lock them in their rooms. When he left we were upstairs. There is no point in scolding his wife. We can’t afford to put them in a home and really for the most part they can remain, since they have us. And this is life, I say. My wife is often befuddled, exasperated, all the multi-syllable words that mean days and nights are hard. But we are warm. I have work. They haven’t taken all her disability. The old woman is warm too and she has her little dog she loves with the black and white spots. The one who lap-tongues as she holds his leash and powers her wheelchair through the cemetery. He climbs up into her lap, as she sits and watches the snow out her window. Her cupboards are full, and her girlfriends will bring her what she needs. She misses her daughters who live states away. She will call them in the morning to tell them about the snow, and how the city glows with snow as it covers the dirt, rust, and garbage careless people spill. If you had a four-wheel drive truck, you could drive through the downpour and see her room in the old Victorian building turned into tenements. You could see how her room looks out at the street, and see her there in the window, the way I often do when I drive past. And tonight, you could see her small dog in her lap beside a lamp, and how the room shines with the blue light of snowlight and the television newscaster telling her about tomorrow’s weather. |
Sean Thomas Dougherty's most recent book is the memoir in prose and prose poems Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. A longtime disability worker, he works as a Carer and Medtech along Lake Erie. New essays forthcoming in Brevity, Craft, Crab Creek Review, Flash Boulevard, River and South, and Talking River Review
ESSAYS - February 2026: Barrie Brewer, Zary Fekete,
Paul Hostovsky, Enzo Silon Surin, Anne Whitehouse
"To write is to hope..." ― Enzo Silon Surin
Paul Hostovsky, Enzo Silon Surin, Anne Whitehouse
"To write is to hope..." ― Enzo Silon Surin
Barrie Brewer
|
The Choice Between
What if the most authentic version of ourselves lives in the life we never dared to choose? The question rises with the steam from the pasta pot, curling toward the ceiling as if searching for a way out. Tonight, it lingers longer than usual: humid, heavy, and haunting. I’m at the stove, heating water and stirring sauce, while the house hums around me. The dishwasher drones, my kids argue over screen time, the television preaches another round of political noise. A notification buzzes my phone: immediate action required, expired card, auto pay mortgage. I swipe it away, pretending that solves everything. Another deadline. Another reason to stay tethered. “Did you salt the water this time?” My wife slicing tomatoes, turns away with a wry expression. The knife hitting the board louder on the last cut. “Yeah,” I answer, my words here in the present, while my thoughts are thousands of miles away, somewhere deep in the Amazon. It’s been years since our family expedition, but the memory waits for me like an unopened letter. I can still see the river, meandering slow, alive, and crystal clear, with canoes lining the rocky bank. The air thick with something ancient. Time moved differently there—not by deadlines, but from light to dark. And then, there he was: the tribal elder. Painted in ochre and ash, he stood across the water, spear balanced on his shoulders. His gaze was calm, unblinking, unsettling—and familiar. No notifications. No countdown to the next deadline. I did not stay with him. I stepped into the waiting canoe, the one homeward bound. I glanced back only once, my hand tightening around the rough wooden gunwale, as if I could still change my mind. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if that was the moment I started to drift away from myself. Back at the stove, the pot rattles and starts boiling over. “Dad! It’s overflowing!” my son calls without looking up from his tablet. I turn down the flame. Steam billows and washes over my face. “Got it,” My voice sounds distant. Steam rises from the pasta pot and changes shape—at first a face I half-remember, then the prow of a canoe cutting through rain. Then a reminder I’m still here, still cooking the same meal I’ve made a hundred times. The hiss becomes rain, and I’m back on the riverbank in half-light. I make the other choice. I don’t board the canoe. The current tugs at my legs, firm and cold. In this other version, my wife’s voice rises behind me, “Wait! You can’t be serious!” But the current is stronger than doubt. I wade chest-deep into the river. Her protests fade into the jungle’s embrace. The air tastes of rain and risk. “Dad, are you listening?” my daughter asks. Jerking the spoon against the side of the pot. “Always,” I say, though both of us know it’s a lie. Balancing a stack of plates, she watches me. After a moment, her eyes narrow—not angry, just resigned, like she’s done trying to pull me back. She looks away and sets them down gently, like she’s trying not to disturb something delicate. No more questions. In the life I imagine, the rain never stops. It falls in sheets, relentless, threatening to submerge everything in its path. Our first shelter is a patchwork of palm fronds and failures. My soft hands blister and split on bamboo. The elder watches from a distance, offering no help, only witness. “Pain teaches faster than pride,” I imagine him saying. I learn in silence—striking flint against soaked bark, reading the moods of clouds, waiting for the kindling to believe in fire. “Why does it rain so much?” my son asks one night, teeth chattering under a leaking roof.“Because it can,” I tell him. The answer is satisfactory. Days blur. I stop counting time in weekends. The machete that once blistered my hands now feels like a limb. I start to hear meaning in every sound, the toucan’s warning, the hush before something unseen moves. Even silence speaks. I no longer walk through the jungle. I move with it. My wife transforms too. She learns to pull nourishment from what others call poison, to find rhythm in the moon and patience in the soil. Our children thrive, barefoot, fearless, fluent in instinct. In real life, they stare at tablets, blue light painting their faces. At night, we sit by the fire. Sparks lift like fireflies escaping dusk. I tell stories not from books but from the day’s events: the monkey that mocked me, the vine that bled red sap, the serpent that watched but didn’t strike. The jungle becomes our teacher, our mirror, our measure. A place where who you are isn’t defined by what you produce. And yet, even in that imagined life, it always ends the same way. The river waits. The elder’s eyes find mine. The canoe drifts at the edge of choice. That’s where I wake. “Is dinner ready?” my wife calls from the dining room. The spell breaks. The roar of the fire becomes the low hum of the dishwasher. Steam rises again, curling upward like the question that never leaves. I drain the pasta and watch the water spiral down the sink—a whirlpool of second chances swirling down the drain. “Smells good,” my daughter says, setting out forks. She moves past me and I feel the brush of her shoulder before she steps away. “Yeah,” I say, eyes following the last ghost of steam. For a moment, I see the elder’s gaze—steady, unhurried. My chest tightens, a vice closing around my ribs. I don’t know when longing became a form of betrayal. “Can you pass the sauce?” my wife asks. I hesitate, fumbling with both hands. “Everything okay?” she asks softly. “Just tired,” I say, forcing a smile. She searches my face a few blinks longer than usual. The corner of her mouth twitches, like she wants to ask something like “You haven’t really been with us in weeks.” Instead, she looks down at her plate and the moment passes. Later, when the house falls quiet, I linger at the window. Moonlight splashes silver streaks across the countertops. Outside, wind stirs the trees, and for an instant, our suburban yard dissolves: hedges giving way to vines, lawn and flower beds turning into a rocky riverbank. I close my eyes, and there he is again, the elder, sitting cross-legged on the far shore, spear across his knees. “What are you waiting for?” I whisper. No answer, just the faint rustle of leaves. And then I understand. But understanding doesn’t quiet the longing. It only names it. He isn’t waiting for me. He’s waiting within me. The man I chose not to be did not vanish; he went underground, buried beneath bills, deadlines, and the hum of ordinary life. But he’s still there, breathing, patiently waiting. The refrigerator hums. The clock ticks. In the other room a sleeping child’s half-cry, half-whisper, reminding me that even in sleep, dreams can obsess us. I press my hand against the cold glass of the window. My reflection stares back, older, softer, alive with family, comfort, safety, and love on this side; authenticity, wildness, and solitude on the other. In the hollow beneath my ribs, something stirs, a pulse, a longing, wild and familiar. Maybe the question was never about crossing to the other side. Maybe it was about remembering it was still there. I know I’ll wake tomorrow to the same packed lunches, meetings, and laundry. But somewhere—beneath all that—I’ll still be listening for rain. I smile, the longing inside me softening into a steady breath. Outside, the trees sway, whispering. The jungle’s voice returns, not as a memory, but a reminder of the choice between. Author Note: Barrie Brewer is a storyteller, adventure traveler, and leadership educator whose work explores the paradox between discovery and responsibility. His writing often weaves lyrical realism with lived adventure—from the Amazon Basin to the mountain ranges of North America. This story emerges from his recurring theme: some of the greatest adventures are the ones we never exploit, but never stop imagining. |
A lifelong adventure traveler and keen observer of people, Barrie Brewer brings a global sensibility to his work, shaped by years of working alongside leaders, artists, and change makers. His nonfiction weaves narrative with insight, often delving into the tension between curiosity and caution, purpose and uncertainty.
Zary Fekete
|
The Map of the Class
Our Japanese teacher handed out blank world maps. No names, no capitals…just the thin outlines of continents numbered in neat black ink. We were told to fill them in with country names and capitals written in Katakana. I am in a Japanese language class in Tokyo, where my wife and I recently moved for our missions work. There are six of us, all from elsewhere, all trying to learn how to name the world again. Luka is an engineer from Singapore who now lives in Utah with his wife. They are buying an apartment in Tokyo for when they visit. Alex is Russian; his wife is Ukrainian. They fled to Portugal when the war began, a quiet ceasefire in a personal sense if not a political one. Linda is from the Czech Republic. Her husband works for a Japanese company, and she manages the family’s daily life with their two children as though she were born to navigate foreignness. Song, from South Korea, is also an engineer. His company has given him a leave to study Japanese, and we envy his near-perfect pronunciation. He swears it’s not talent…just the way the languages overlap. And then there’s Paul, from Manila. His wife already lives here and speaks Japanese well. He hopes to join her once he finds a job. When I asked what he does, he told me, almost apologetically, that he’s an auto mechanic. I told him how jealous I was. My father could fix anything…a jack of all trades who kept our family cars running with little more than intuition and a junkyard map in his head. I grew up watching him replace spark plugs and swap transmissions, wondering if I’d ever be that competent. On this morning, our pencils scratched the paper in quiet concentration. Paul sighed often, muttering to himself. When the teacher called on him to identify a country, she pointed to the British Isles. He paused for a long time, then said, “Amerika?” The room went silent. The teacher, gracious and quick, smiled and offered words that softened the moment, but I saw the color rise in Paul’s cheeks. After class we walked down the narrow stairwell together. He laughed about it, but it was a careful laugh, the kind meant to protect a wound. “I’m not good at geography,” he said. “I envy how you know all the countries. My school was very basic.” He said it lightly, but it stayed with me. His knowledge had been built on engines and torque, not atlases. I’d been given maps and books without ever realizing they were gifts. That night, I thought about the invisible balance between us…how what I called “education” was, to him, luxury; and what he called “work” was, to me, mystery. In class the next day, we sat beside each other again. The teacher had us practice new phrases simple sentences: Watashi wa gakusei desu. I am a student. The room filled with repetition, everyone’s accents folding together into something soft and unhurried. Paul’s pronunciation was careful but solid. He whispered the words before saying them aloud, the way a mechanic might test an engine before revving it. When he finally spoke, the sound had a quiet steadiness, as though he were rebuilding something invisible inside himself. During the breaks we didn’t speak much, just small talk about the weather, about the subway system, about the strange difficulty of remembering when to use wa or ga. The conversation was awkward, but kind. At one point, he said, “You know, I was nervous to come here. I thought everyone would be smarter than me.” I told him I had felt the same way. Later, walking home through the clean Tokyo streets, I kept thinking about that. How easily we measure ourselves against one another, how envy crosses borders more fluently than language ever could. I had envied his skill with machines, the way he could turn broken parts into movement. He envied the ease with which I filled in the names of faraway countries. We were, in the end, both just learning…both fumbling through new vocabularies, each of us wanting to belong somewhere, to make something work. Now, each afternoon, I sit next to Paul again. We open our textbooks, bow to the teacher, and repeat the same phrases in careful unison. The sound of our voices is uneven, halting, sometimes wrong. But there is humility in the effort, a shared patience that feels like its own kind of fluency. We keep studying, side by side, neither of us fluent yet…in language, or in life…but both a little less alone. |
Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary and currently lives in Tokyo. He has a debut novella, Words on the Page, out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection, To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction, out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky:zaryfekete.bsky.social
Paul Hostovsky
Like Braille
Whenever I come across a poet or writer using braille as a metaphor or simile—this or that is like braille or is like someone reading braille—I bristle a little. I can’t help it. Because I know they don’t know braille. Rarely if ever do I come across a description of what braille itself is like.
Let me tell you what braille is like.
Braille is raised white dots on a white page, like a country of igloos as seen from an airplane on a sunny morning in the Arctic.
Braille is like the goose bumps on the arm of the reader reading an exquisite poem she doesn’t totally get but can’t get enough of.
Braille is six dots in a cell. Two columns of three. Like a narrow three-story building at dusk with two windows on each floor, each window with two possibilities: light on or light off. Dot or no dot. There are sixty-four possible combinations of the six dots. Two to the sixth power. Or two times two times two times two times two times two. The braille reader is a safecracker intuiting the combination by feel, opening the safe and taking the money, the gold, all of it, every time.
Every written language on the planet fits inside the braille cell.
Many words in braille are contracted while others are spelled out. Braille is like the heart, contracting and relaxing.
Some braille contractions can stand alone and also within words, like the of in soft, the for in fork, the the in Theresa, the and in Andy and Sandy.
Some braille contractions are a single letter standing for a whole word--b is but, c is can, d is do, e is every, f is from, etc. It’s the ultimate compression: distilling language down to the first letter of each word in the sentence, like Levin’s secret message to Kitty in Anna Karenina.
A skilled braille reader can read with both hands, left hand beginning each line, handing it off to the right hand halfway across the page, the right hand finishing the line as the left moves down to begin reading the next line. Left hand to right hand to left hand to right hand. Expert, fleet, like a concert pianist, or like relay runners in a race, the handoff accomplished seamlessly over and over, line by line down the page, page by page through the book, book by book through a lifetime of reading.
I like the idea of touching the words. That may be just a romantic notion—I mean, braille readers aren’t necessarily more “in touch” with the words than print readers are—but I like it nonetheless. I learned braille in my early twenties, on a lark. I had a blind roommate. I loved watching him read. I had none of the attendant grief and/or denial that a person who is losing their vision will likely experience when setting out to learn braille. For me, it was just a hobby, something to do, a game, a curriculum of puzzles. More than anything it was fun! It was all about words. And I have always loved words.
I learned it visually first. Then, later, tactilely. Though it took me some time to develop the sensitivity required to read with my fingers, I don’t think braille has made me a more sensitive reader per se. But it has made me a more versatile one: I can read with my eyes closed; I can read with the book closed (my hand tucked inside it, reading); I can read in the dark when my wife wants to go to sleep and has turned off the light; I can read in the dentist’s chair while he’s drilling away; I can read while walking; I can read while driving—left hand on the wheel, right hand on the dots, eyes on the road—eyes on the road!
I used to worry that people who saw me reading braille in public—on the subway, say, or in a Starbucks—would think I was blind or pretending to be blind. A sighted person reading braille, after all, is a rare sight, wouldn’t you say? So, for a long time I was in the closet about my braille reading. I only read at home, or in my car. Or, if I ventured out in public with my braille, I would read it furtively, sort of cloak-and-dagger, braille-in-coat-pocket, keeping it hidden under my jacket or inside my knapsack, fingering the dots clandestinely, feeling somehow vaguely illicit about the whole thing. At the Starbucks, for example, I would build a little fort on the table around my braille magazine—backpack, cup of coffee, folded sweater, water bottle, phone—ramparts surrounding the treasure of the dots, hiding the braille so that no one would see me reading it and mistake me for a blind person, or a blind impostor, or a blind wannabe.
I am not a blind wannabe. But I do love braille. I love the physicality of it. There’s something deeply satisfying about using your sense of touch to access language, knowledge, the world. And I love the irony of choosing it—preferring it—over the digital technology that is everywhere around us shouting its claims of “the world at your fingertips.”
The native fluency of a braille reader who grew up reading braille is something I will never be able to emulate. But still, my speed has noticeably increased over the years. And while I’m proud of that fact, I also want to remember this other, perhaps more important fact: reading braille slows me down—and that’s a good thing. It’s one of the things I love about braille. In a way, wanting to read faster runs counter to that desire for slowing down, for going slow, for being present, for being, literally, more in touch with the world. And the word.
Whenever I come across a poet or writer using braille as a metaphor or simile—this or that is like braille or is like someone reading braille—I bristle a little. I can’t help it. Because I know they don’t know braille. Rarely if ever do I come across a description of what braille itself is like.
Let me tell you what braille is like.
Braille is raised white dots on a white page, like a country of igloos as seen from an airplane on a sunny morning in the Arctic.
Braille is like the goose bumps on the arm of the reader reading an exquisite poem she doesn’t totally get but can’t get enough of.
Braille is six dots in a cell. Two columns of three. Like a narrow three-story building at dusk with two windows on each floor, each window with two possibilities: light on or light off. Dot or no dot. There are sixty-four possible combinations of the six dots. Two to the sixth power. Or two times two times two times two times two times two. The braille reader is a safecracker intuiting the combination by feel, opening the safe and taking the money, the gold, all of it, every time.
Every written language on the planet fits inside the braille cell.
Many words in braille are contracted while others are spelled out. Braille is like the heart, contracting and relaxing.
Some braille contractions can stand alone and also within words, like the of in soft, the for in fork, the the in Theresa, the and in Andy and Sandy.
Some braille contractions are a single letter standing for a whole word--b is but, c is can, d is do, e is every, f is from, etc. It’s the ultimate compression: distilling language down to the first letter of each word in the sentence, like Levin’s secret message to Kitty in Anna Karenina.
A skilled braille reader can read with both hands, left hand beginning each line, handing it off to the right hand halfway across the page, the right hand finishing the line as the left moves down to begin reading the next line. Left hand to right hand to left hand to right hand. Expert, fleet, like a concert pianist, or like relay runners in a race, the handoff accomplished seamlessly over and over, line by line down the page, page by page through the book, book by book through a lifetime of reading.
I like the idea of touching the words. That may be just a romantic notion—I mean, braille readers aren’t necessarily more “in touch” with the words than print readers are—but I like it nonetheless. I learned braille in my early twenties, on a lark. I had a blind roommate. I loved watching him read. I had none of the attendant grief and/or denial that a person who is losing their vision will likely experience when setting out to learn braille. For me, it was just a hobby, something to do, a game, a curriculum of puzzles. More than anything it was fun! It was all about words. And I have always loved words.
I learned it visually first. Then, later, tactilely. Though it took me some time to develop the sensitivity required to read with my fingers, I don’t think braille has made me a more sensitive reader per se. But it has made me a more versatile one: I can read with my eyes closed; I can read with the book closed (my hand tucked inside it, reading); I can read in the dark when my wife wants to go to sleep and has turned off the light; I can read in the dentist’s chair while he’s drilling away; I can read while walking; I can read while driving—left hand on the wheel, right hand on the dots, eyes on the road—eyes on the road!
I used to worry that people who saw me reading braille in public—on the subway, say, or in a Starbucks—would think I was blind or pretending to be blind. A sighted person reading braille, after all, is a rare sight, wouldn’t you say? So, for a long time I was in the closet about my braille reading. I only read at home, or in my car. Or, if I ventured out in public with my braille, I would read it furtively, sort of cloak-and-dagger, braille-in-coat-pocket, keeping it hidden under my jacket or inside my knapsack, fingering the dots clandestinely, feeling somehow vaguely illicit about the whole thing. At the Starbucks, for example, I would build a little fort on the table around my braille magazine—backpack, cup of coffee, folded sweater, water bottle, phone—ramparts surrounding the treasure of the dots, hiding the braille so that no one would see me reading it and mistake me for a blind person, or a blind impostor, or a blind wannabe.
I am not a blind wannabe. But I do love braille. I love the physicality of it. There’s something deeply satisfying about using your sense of touch to access language, knowledge, the world. And I love the irony of choosing it—preferring it—over the digital technology that is everywhere around us shouting its claims of “the world at your fingertips.”
The native fluency of a braille reader who grew up reading braille is something I will never be able to emulate. But still, my speed has noticeably increased over the years. And while I’m proud of that fact, I also want to remember this other, perhaps more important fact: reading braille slows me down—and that’s a good thing. It’s one of the things I love about braille. In a way, wanting to read faster runs counter to that desire for slowing down, for going slow, for being present, for being, literally, more in touch with the world. And the word.
Paul Hostovsky's poems and essays appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Your Daily Poem, Only Poems, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter and braille instructor. Website: paulhostovsky.com
Enzo Silon Surin
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The Fragile Architecture of Hope: Writing Toward Repair
The week after the November 2024 election, despair was trending. Everywhere I turned—on social media, in passing conversations, even in poetry circles—people were talking about leaving the country, about the end of the world, about democracy as a failed experiment. As someone who grew up in Haiti under a dictatorship and watched the country I loved torn apart by conflict and a coup d’état, I recognized the tremor beneath that talk—the way disbelief can curdle into resignation. It was a strange chorus to live inside: anger pitched against exhaustion, disbelief against silence. I remember clapping my hands one morning and saying, mostly to myself, “Okay. We’ve got serious work to do.” It wasn’t bravado; it was a refusal to surrender to paralysis. That same day, I wrote a short post online that read: If we showed up to the rally together, we shouldn’t be walking home alone in defeat. If we’re going to get through this and rebuild, this is the time to forge connections—not when it’s convenient. And hope is anything but convenient. Despair, I realized, is a luxury not everyone can afford. When I heard people say it was too soon to hope, it felt like a kind of rejection, like being told to carry my grief alone, along with whatever small vision of repair I was still holding. But the page never turns away. To write is to hope, even when the writing begins in cynicism or utter despair. It’s one thing to name the wound; it’s another to build from it. Some of the most necessary writing begins in the dark, when we can’t tell which way is up, until a single line shows a way through. Even if no one seems to be listening, the act of making is its own defiance—its own small architecture of light. That week, I walked into my Social Action Writing workshop—a college course I designed for a time such as this, taught at an art school where words are just one of many materials my students use to make sense of the world—and found a small, steady light waiting for me. We had the rare gift of meeting once before and once after the election—fifteen students who refused to look away. We had been writing poems of witness and provocation, examining how language can both confront and console. But that morning, their presence reminded me of something else: that even when the world feels uninhabitable, there are still builders at work. The room hummed with quiet resolve. Students wrote about loss, justice, and the invisible labor of staying alive in an age of forgetting. They weren’t writing about escape; they were writing toward endurance. In a world shouting about endings, they were sketching beginnings. Without naming it, we were crafting hope. I’ve thought about that day often—how the work of writing became indistinguishable from the work of repair. In a year that kept insisting on its own unraveling, those students built something sturdy out of words. They showed me that hope is not an emotion but a practice, a discipline of attention. It’s what happens when we decide to keep showing up, even when we no longer believe showing up will change anything. In my forthcoming poetry collection, there’s a section titled The Fragile Architecture of Hope. I didn’t know, when I first wrote it, how prophetic that title would feel. Hope really is fragile. It bends under the weight of injustice and fatigue. It requires maintenance, constant repair. But it is also, like any architecture, the result of deliberate design—an act of imagination against gravity. When I write, I think about the materials we build with: silence, syntax, breath. Line breaks that hold the weight of grief. White space that lets the reader rest before returning to what hurts. Repetition as scaffolding, image as beam. The poem, like a structure, must hold what it was never meant to carry, and still let in the light. In teaching, I’ve learned that repair is rarely elegant. It’s more like patchwork: provisional, imperfect, necessary. We piece together something livable from the remains. In that sense, poetry isn’t just an art form; it’s a form of care. It gives us a language sturdy enough to name what’s broken without becoming broken ourselves. But the temptation toward collapse is real. Cynicism is seductive—it lets us feel wise while staying still. It gives us the illusion of control: if we predict the worst, we’ll never be surprised. Yet cynicism builds nothing. It only refines the language of ruin. Hope, on the other hand, asks us to keep believing in the act of making. To write even when the sentence feels impossible. To imagine what might be rebuilt, even as the walls around us tremble. Hope is the poet’s resistance to finality—it insists there is always more to say, more to build, more to hold. The truth is, I don’t think the world can be repaired by poetry alone. But I do believe poetry helps us remember why repair is worth attempting. It gives us a place to practice what the world keeps forgetting: empathy, patience, clarity, courage. It reminds us that language can be both witness and blueprint. Sometimes, when the news cycle spins itself into another storm, I think back to that classroom, to fifteen students and one teacher refusing to give up on the possibility of meaning. I think of how we kept writing, not because we were certain of hope, but because we were practicing its shape. Despair was trending. For some of us, it always is. Hope, I’ve come to believe, is not the denial of despair but its counterweight. It’s the hand that steadies the beam while the structure is still swaying. It’s the sound of fifteen pencils moving across paper, each one testing the strength of what might still hold. And maybe that’s what poetry is: not a shelter from the storm, but a way of standing in it together—hands raw, eyes open, still building. |
Enzo Silon Surin is an award-winning Haitian-born poet, author, educator, and publisher. He is the author of American Scapegoat and When My Body Was a Clinched Fist, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, and the founder of Central Square Press. He hosts the podcast It’s a Poetic Life and lives and teaches in Massachusetts.
Anne Whitehouse
POE vs. HIMSELF
On May 3, 1841, Edgar Allan Poe, a thirty-two-year-old editor at Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia, penned a request to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University. Two years Poe’s senior, Longfellow was established in an academic career and already had achieved renown as a poet, translator, and author of travelogues and romances. Ambitious and poor, Poe was hoping to make his literary reputation and support himself as an editor and tastemaker. He had been trying to raise funds for his own publication, to be called Penn’s Magazine, when a young Philadelphia lawyer and cabinetmaker, George Rex Graham, made him a liberal offer to join the staff of his newly established magazine, with a circulation of five thousand. Poe seized his chance. To impress the professor of modern languages, Poe self-consciously sprinkled his entreaty with French phrases and flattered him with compliments:
On May 3, 1841, Edgar Allan Poe, a thirty-two-year-old editor at Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia, penned a request to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University. Two years Poe’s senior, Longfellow was established in an academic career and already had achieved renown as a poet, translator, and author of travelogues and romances. Ambitious and poor, Poe was hoping to make his literary reputation and support himself as an editor and tastemaker. He had been trying to raise funds for his own publication, to be called Penn’s Magazine, when a young Philadelphia lawyer and cabinetmaker, George Rex Graham, made him a liberal offer to join the staff of his newly established magazine, with a circulation of five thousand. Poe seized his chance. To impress the professor of modern languages, Poe self-consciously sprinkled his entreaty with French phrases and flattered him with compliments:
DEAR SIR—Mr. George R. Graham, proprietor of Graham’s Magazine, a monthly journal published in this city and edited by myself, desires me to beg of you the honor of your contribution to its pages. Upon the principle that we seldom obtain what we very anxiously covet, I confess that I have but little hope of inducing you to write for us,—and to say the truth, I fear that Mr. Graham would have opened the negotiation much better in his own person, for I have no reason to think myself favorably known to you; but the attempt was to be made, and I make it.
I should be overjoyed if we could get from you an article each month, either poetry or prose, length and subject à discretion. In respect to terms, we would gladly offer you carte blanche; and the periods of payment should also be made to suit yourself.
In conclusion, I cannot refrain from availing myself of this, the only opportunity I may ever have, to assure the author of the “Hymn to the Night,” of the “Beleaguered City,” and of the “Skeleton in Armor,” of the fervent admiration with which his genius has inspired me; and yet I would scarcely hazard a declaration whose import might be so easily misconstrued, and which bears with it, at best, more or less of niaiserie, were I not convinced that Professor Longfellow, writing and thinking as he does, will be at no less to feel and to appreciate the honest sincerity of what I say.
With the highest respect,
Your obedient servant,
Edgar A. Poe
As Poe anticipated, Longfellow turned down the request. In a noncommittal yet gracious response, he conveyed to Poe his own compliments:
May 19, 1841
Your favor of the 3d inst., with the two numbers of the Magazine, reached me only a day or two ago.
I am much obliged to you for your kind expression of regard, and to Mr. Graham for his very generous offer, of which I should gladly avail myself under other circumstances. But I am so much occupied at present that I could not do it with any satisfaction either to you or to myself. I must therefore respectfully decline his proposition.
You are mistaken in supposing that you are not “favorably known to me.” On the contrary, all that I have read from your pen has inspired me with a high idea of your power, and I think you are destined to stand among the first romance-writers of the country, if such be your aim.
The two writers never met, and this exchange marked the beginning and end of their correspondence. Nevertheless, their names have been linked in the annals of American cultural history because of Poe’s literary attacks against Longfellow four years later in 1845, which Poe titled the “Little Longfellow War.” Poe’s “War” was an unprovoked aggression against one of the most beloved figures of the New England literary establishment, outraging Longfellow’s friends and fans. Chief among the contemporary writers who responded in Longfellow’s defense was someone who referred to himself as “Outis,” Greek for “nobody.” This curious contretemps in American literary history has intrigued generations of scholars. Who was Outis? Was it one of Longfellow’s friends, as some have thought, perhaps the poet James Russell Lowell who also published and championed Poe? Was it another poet friend, and which one? Was it Longfellow himself? Or someone else?
The year after his request to Longfellow and Longfellow’s polite refusal, Poe began to sharpen his steel for his Little Longfellow War. In the March 1842 issue of Graham’s Magazine, Poe published a negative review of Longfellow’s Ballads of the Night, a collection of original poems and translations. Longfellow’s translations, Poe claimed, failed to do justice to the author or translator, but Poe reserved his most scathing criticism for Longfellow’s own poems, basing his disapproval, as he would again in the “Little Longfellow War,” on theoretical reasoning: “Mr. Longfellow’s conception of the aims of poesy is all wrong,” he wrote, “and this we shall prove at some future day.”
Three years later, in January 1845, now living in New York and reviewing Longfellow’s The Waif in the Daily Mirror, Poe revised his conception of Longfellow as a didactic naif who wrote “brilliant poems—by accident” to accuse him of that most serious of literary crimes—plagiarism: “We conclude our notes on the ‘Waif,’ with the observation that, although full of beauties, it is infected with a moral taint . . . somebody is a thief.” Poe accused Longfellow not of copying others’ words verbatim, which is our contemporary understanding of plagiarism, but of appropriating others’ ideas, meters, rhythms, and images. Longfellow, he charged, was guilty of “the most barbarous class of literary robbery; that class in which, while the words of the wronged author are avoided, his most intangible, and therefore least defensible and least reclaimable property is purloined.”
Two months later in March, now editing the New York-based Broadway Journal, Poe took advantage of his position to expand his charges of plagiarism against Longfellow. His elaboration of this “large account of a small matter” filled the pages of the Broadway Journal for six consecutive weeks, from March 1, 1845, to April 5, 1845. Poe claimed that he was writing in response to several of “Longfellow’s friends,” who had sent protests to the Daily Mirror, defending Longfellow against Poe’s attack on The Waif. According to Poe, Outis was the most persistent of the group, and Poe reproduced his long essay verbatim from the Daily Mirror to the Broadway Journal, prefacing an even more lengthy response. Outis asked:
The year after his request to Longfellow and Longfellow’s polite refusal, Poe began to sharpen his steel for his Little Longfellow War. In the March 1842 issue of Graham’s Magazine, Poe published a negative review of Longfellow’s Ballads of the Night, a collection of original poems and translations. Longfellow’s translations, Poe claimed, failed to do justice to the author or translator, but Poe reserved his most scathing criticism for Longfellow’s own poems, basing his disapproval, as he would again in the “Little Longfellow War,” on theoretical reasoning: “Mr. Longfellow’s conception of the aims of poesy is all wrong,” he wrote, “and this we shall prove at some future day.”
Three years later, in January 1845, now living in New York and reviewing Longfellow’s The Waif in the Daily Mirror, Poe revised his conception of Longfellow as a didactic naif who wrote “brilliant poems—by accident” to accuse him of that most serious of literary crimes—plagiarism: “We conclude our notes on the ‘Waif,’ with the observation that, although full of beauties, it is infected with a moral taint . . . somebody is a thief.” Poe accused Longfellow not of copying others’ words verbatim, which is our contemporary understanding of plagiarism, but of appropriating others’ ideas, meters, rhythms, and images. Longfellow, he charged, was guilty of “the most barbarous class of literary robbery; that class in which, while the words of the wronged author are avoided, his most intangible, and therefore least defensible and least reclaimable property is purloined.”
Two months later in March, now editing the New York-based Broadway Journal, Poe took advantage of his position to expand his charges of plagiarism against Longfellow. His elaboration of this “large account of a small matter” filled the pages of the Broadway Journal for six consecutive weeks, from March 1, 1845, to April 5, 1845. Poe claimed that he was writing in response to several of “Longfellow’s friends,” who had sent protests to the Daily Mirror, defending Longfellow against Poe’s attack on The Waif. According to Poe, Outis was the most persistent of the group, and Poe reproduced his long essay verbatim from the Daily Mirror to the Broadway Journal, prefacing an even more lengthy response. Outis asked:
What is plagiarism? And what constitutes a good ground for the charge? Did no two men ever think alike without stealing one from the other? or, thinking alike, did no two men ever use the same, or similar words, to convey the thoughts, and that, without any communication with each other? To deny it would be absurd.
Outis proceeded to give the example of “an anonymous writer, observing a January thaw, when the snow, mingled with rain, and freezing as it falls, forms a perfect covering of ice upon every object,” who then wrote a description of “every tree and shrub, as far as the eye can reach, of pure transparent glass—a perfect garden of moving, waving, breathing crystals. . . . . . Every tree is a diamond chandelier, with a whole constellation of stars clustering to every socket.” Supposing, Outis went on, this anonymous writer put his description in a drawer. Soon after, there appeared in a publication a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier that described a similar scene, “The trees, like crystal chandeliers.” The similarity was not a theft, but a coincidence. “Images are not created, but suggested,” reasoned Outis. “And why not the same images, when the circumstances are precisely the same, to different minds?”
While praising Poe’s poem, “The Raven,” as “a remarkable poem . . . of uncommon merit,” Outis went on to maintain that, given his definition of plagiarism, Poe was himself guilty of this charge in his poem, which borrowed its meter and rhythm from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:
While praising Poe’s poem, “The Raven,” as “a remarkable poem . . . of uncommon merit,” Outis went on to maintain that, given his definition of plagiarism, Poe was himself guilty of this charge in his poem, which borrowed its meter and rhythm from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:
From Poe’s “The Raven:”
Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore,
Let my heart be still a moment, and this mystery explore.
And again --
It shall clasp a sainted maiden, whom the angels name Lenore--
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels name Lenore.
Mr. Coleridge says, (running two lines into one:)
For all averred I had killed the bird, that made the breeze to blow.
“Ah wretch!” said they, “the bird to slay, and made the breeze to blow.”
And again --
They all averred I had killed the bird, that brought the fog and mist.
“ ’Twas right,” said they, “such birds to slay, that bring the fog and mist.”
Moreover, argued Outis, there was “an anonymous poem of five years ago, entitled ‘The Bird and the Dream,’” wherein he found no less than fifteen “identities” with “The Raven,” and “that too, without a word of rhythm, metre or stanza, which should never form a part of such a comparison.” He proceeded to describe these “identities” in detail. Yet, in spite of all this, Outis continued, he would not charge Poe with plagiarism. On the contrary, he heaped high praise on the poem for its “originality”:
Such criticisms only make the author of them contemptible, without soiling a plume in the cap of his victim. I have selected this poem of Mr. Poe’s for illustrating my remarks, because it is recent, and must be familiar to all the lovers of true poetry hereabouts. It is remarkable for its power, beauty, and originality.
Outis concluded his commentary:
Though acquainted with Mr. Longfellow . . . I have no acquaintance with Mr. Poe. I have written what I have written from no personal motives, but simply because, from my earliest reading of reviews and critical notices, I have been disgusted with this wholesale mangling of victims without rhyme or reason. I scarcely remember an instance where the resemblances detected were not exceedingly far-fetched and shadowy, and only perceptible to a mind pre-disposed to suspicion, and accustomed to splitting hairs.
Outis’s epistle galvanized Poe to a counter-response of nearly fifteen thousand words, “A Continuation of the Voluminous History of the Little Longfellow War,” published in the Broadway Journal the following week on March 15. Here Poe’s tone veered from the almost reasonable to the nearly hysterical. With respect to the image of “The trees, like crystal chandeliers,” Poe argued:
He wishes to show, then, that Mr. Longfellow is innocent of the imitation with which I have charged him . . . and this . . . innocence is expected to be proved by showing the possibility that a certain, or that any uncertain series of coincidences may be the result of pure accident. Now of course I cannot be sure that Outis will regard my admission as a service or a disservice, but I admit the possibility at once. . . . But in admitting this, I admit just nothing at all, so far as the advancement of Outis’s proper argument is concerned. The affair is one of probabilities altogether, and can be satisfactorily settled only by reference to their Calculus.
Poe took the opportunity to launch into a long and detailed analysis and comparison of his use of poetic meter and rhyme in “The Raven,” which denied any resemblance to Coleridge’s famous poem. One by one, he refuted each of the “identities” found by Outis. He claimed his arrangement of poetic meter was unique:
My own has at least the merit of being my own. No writer, living or dead, has ever employed anything resembling it. The innumerable specific differences between it and that of Outis it would be a tedious matter to point out—but a far less difficult matter than to designate one individual point of similarity.
Apparently beset by emotion, Poe allowed the tone of his rebuttal to Outis to escalate, until it is hard not to read in it a dominant note of (to use a term that Poe might have employed himself) ressentiment. Amounting to more than resentment, ressentiment is a deeper grievance, which often—as in this case—has its basis in disparities of wealth and social class. He wrote:
The plagiarist is either a man of no note or a man of note. In the first case, he is usually an ignoramus, and getting possession of a rather rare book, plunders it without scruple, on the ground that nobody has ever seen a copy of it except himself. In the second case (which is a more general one by far) he pilfers from some poverty-stricken, and therefore neglected man of genius, on the reasonable supposition that this neglected man of genius will very soon cut his throat, or die of starvation, (the sooner the better, no doubt,) and that in the meantime he will be too busy in keeping the wolf from the door to look after the purloiners of his property—and too poor, and too cowed, and for these reasons too contemptible, under any circumstances, to dare accuse of so base a thing as theft, the wealthy and triumphant gentleman of elegant leisure who has only done the vagabond too much honor in knocking him down and robbing him upon the highway.
In Poe’s conception, he was “this neglected man of genius” and Longfellow was the “wealthy and triumphant gentleman of elegant leisure.” Born to a prominent Portland, Maine, family that could trace its origins back to Mayflower passengers John and Priscilla Alden, Longfellow enjoyed a secure background and a fortunate upbringing. One grandfather was a Revolutionary War hero, the other grandfather a prominent judge, and his father was a prosperous attorney who had represented his Maine district in the House of Representatives. Longfellow had been privately tutored as a boy and completed his education at Bowdoin College, where his father was one of the founding trustees, Nathaniel Hawthorne one of his classmates, and Franklin Pierce in the class ahead of him. With his knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian, and German, his years of European travel, his academic sinecure at Harvard, and his comfortable existence in beautiful, historic Craigie House, in rooms once occupied by George Washington, Longfellow enjoyed a life of privilege that was everything that Poe’s life was not.
Orphaned at an early age, disowned by his guardian whose fortune he had expected to inherit, forced to withdraw from the University of Virginia after one year because of gambling debts, susceptible to drugs and alcohol, Poe lived a life of constant turmoil. He frequently changed lodgings and jobs, nearly always in poverty and emotional upheaval. Nevertheless, Poe considered himself to be Longfellow’s intellectual superior. Poe was a self-proclaimed literary theoretician, devoted to reason, logic, and rigor, an autodidact who cleaved to high, self-imposed standards. An intellectual outside of the academy, Poe had all the brilliance and dangerous notions of a man who had developed his ideas in relative isolation. In contrast, Longfellow, despite his formal education, was a dreamy popularizer and a borrower from other cultures, whose poetry inhabited moods and tales rather than ideas, and who showed little interest in literary theories.
Poe couldn’t forgive Longfellow for his popularity—his embrace by the literary and academic establishment and the less sophisticated public, who were reassured and comforted by Longfellow’s didacticism, even as they were in thrall to the music of his verses and his narrative skills. In contrast, Poe depicted himself as an independent voice of poetic principles, railing against charlatans like Longfellow and their cowardly, anonymous defenders like Outis. As he complained on March 29 in the Broadway Journal:
Orphaned at an early age, disowned by his guardian whose fortune he had expected to inherit, forced to withdraw from the University of Virginia after one year because of gambling debts, susceptible to drugs and alcohol, Poe lived a life of constant turmoil. He frequently changed lodgings and jobs, nearly always in poverty and emotional upheaval. Nevertheless, Poe considered himself to be Longfellow’s intellectual superior. Poe was a self-proclaimed literary theoretician, devoted to reason, logic, and rigor, an autodidact who cleaved to high, self-imposed standards. An intellectual outside of the academy, Poe had all the brilliance and dangerous notions of a man who had developed his ideas in relative isolation. In contrast, Longfellow, despite his formal education, was a dreamy popularizer and a borrower from other cultures, whose poetry inhabited moods and tales rather than ideas, and who showed little interest in literary theories.
Poe couldn’t forgive Longfellow for his popularity—his embrace by the literary and academic establishment and the less sophisticated public, who were reassured and comforted by Longfellow’s didacticism, even as they were in thrall to the music of his verses and his narrative skills. In contrast, Poe depicted himself as an independent voice of poetic principles, railing against charlatans like Longfellow and their cowardly, anonymous defenders like Outis. As he complained on March 29 in the Broadway Journal:
There is not a man living, of common sense and common honesty, who has not better reason (if possible) to be disgusted with the insufferable cant and shameless misrepresentation practiced habitually by just such persons as Outis, with the view of decrying by sheer strength of lungs—of trampling down—of rioting down—of mobbing down any man with a soul that bids him come out from among the general corruption of our public press, and take his stand upon the open ground of rectitude and honor. The Outises who practice this species of bullyism are, as a matter of course, anonymous.
In the 170 years since Poe published this diatribe, the identity of Outis, whom Poe compared to a bullying mob, has been the subject of speculation among scholars, who have attempted to identify various contemporary figures as Poe’s shadowy adversary. None of the candidates, however, has earned any sort of universal acceptance. Attacking Poe was one of the surest routes to popularity in most of the literary circles of the time, yet no writer stepped forward to take credit for Outis, and Longfellow himself professed ignorance on the matter, although Outis claimed to be a friend of his.
So long after the fact, the person of Outis remains a mystery, and Poe’s motives in initiating and prolonging the controversy a matter of debate. Was Poe exhibiting more of his out-of-control, crazy behavior in promulgating the “Little Longfellow War”? How seriously should we take his charges? Were his literary criticisms credible, if cranky?
In his long rebuttal to Outis, Poe offers a clue to his motivations when he defends himself against the charge of unpopularity:
So long after the fact, the person of Outis remains a mystery, and Poe’s motives in initiating and prolonging the controversy a matter of debate. Was Poe exhibiting more of his out-of-control, crazy behavior in promulgating the “Little Longfellow War”? How seriously should we take his charges? Were his literary criticisms credible, if cranky?
In his long rebuttal to Outis, Poe offers a clue to his motivations when he defends himself against the charge of unpopularity:
In one year, the circulation of the “Southern Messenger” (a five-dollar journal) extended itself from seven hundred to nearly five thousand,—and that, in little more than twice the same time, “Graham’s Magazine” swelled its list from five to fifty-two thousand subscribers.
Was the “Little Longfellow War” a publicity stunt instigated by Poe in an effort to try to increase the circulation of the Broadway Journal, as he had with previous periodicals? In Poe’s day, as well as in ours, controversy sold copies, and Poe’s quarrel with Longfellow was not the first nor the last literary feud that he provoked for the sake of boosting sales. More than one critic has suggested that Outis was none other than Poe himself. The inventor of the modern detective story, Poe enjoyed mysteries and games. As in “The Purloined Letter,” he hid his clues in plain sight. In an unpublished essay, “The Reviewer Reviewed,” Poe, writing under the name of Walter G. Bowen, attacked his own writings in a tone reminiscent of Outis. In her thesis, “Poe’s Poisoned Pen: A Study of Fiction as Vendetta,” Charity Lea Givens argues, “Even his short stories can be read as sophisticated arguments and vicious attacks on members of the literary community . . . he wrote that when he approached writing, he differed from most authors: where they chose to begin with narrative and historical influences, Poe began with effect . . . He wanted to have an effect—an original effect—that would impress his audience.”
While assuming that Poe was not Outis, Arthur H. Quinn observed in his 1941 biography that “Poe seized upon this letter of Outis as an opportunity to stage a discussion that would be good publicity for the Broadway Journal, of which he had just become an editor,” noting that Longfellow’s defender wrote “in a clever imitation of Poe’s manner.”
The first of Poe’s commentators to surmise that Outis was Poe’s invention was George P. Eveleth (1819-1908), who was a medical student in Maine when he initiated a correspondence with Poe in December, 1845. Eveleth peppered Poe with questions during his life, and after his death, he appointed himself Poe’s standard-bearer, correcting what he deemed to be the errors of Poe’s biographers. Although Eveleth and Poe never met, Poe’s letters to Eveleth were unusually candid, and Eveleth believed “that the natural tendency of my mind is into trains of thinking similar to Poe’s.” Outis’s prose style is a more tamped down, restrained version of Poe’s, though their modes of argument are similar.
All his life, Poe delighted in hiding behind multiple identities and inventing adventures and escapades for himself. In his life and his art, he was a master manipulator. In “The Colloquy of Edgar and Outis,” the writer Undine noted that Outis was “too good to be true,” a phantom foe offering Poe “arguments that he could easily shoot down, as well as giving him a preplanned excuse to repeat and expand upon his literary criticism.” Moreover, while purporting to criticize Poe, Outis flattered him, alluding to his “beautiful and powerful poem” and playing the same word game with Poe’s name as Poe had done earlier: “Mr. EDGAR A. POE. (Write it rather EDGAR, a Poet, and then it is right to a T.”
I agree that Outis was a useful invention for Poe, giving him an adversary in a public forum whom he could manipulate to his heart’s content. Far from a “pathetic wreck” on the verge of mental collapse, “thoroughly embarrassed” and “driven to his wit’s end to vindicate himself,” as his biographer Sidney Moss described him, Poe was an obsessive, self-promoting schemer, with a rapier-sharp wit, a love of intrigue, and an enjoyment of the joke that turned on itself like a Mobius strip. Indeed, these are the aspects of his character that speak so forcefully to our present day.
One could almost see Poe chuckling behind his moustache and his huge, accusing eyes—and behind the protean mask of Outis—as, in the March 29 Broadway Journal, he blamed Longfellow for “ridiculous, anonymous letters” and accused him of sending Outis and a certain Miss Walter (“a pretty little witch”) to attack him:
While assuming that Poe was not Outis, Arthur H. Quinn observed in his 1941 biography that “Poe seized upon this letter of Outis as an opportunity to stage a discussion that would be good publicity for the Broadway Journal, of which he had just become an editor,” noting that Longfellow’s defender wrote “in a clever imitation of Poe’s manner.”
The first of Poe’s commentators to surmise that Outis was Poe’s invention was George P. Eveleth (1819-1908), who was a medical student in Maine when he initiated a correspondence with Poe in December, 1845. Eveleth peppered Poe with questions during his life, and after his death, he appointed himself Poe’s standard-bearer, correcting what he deemed to be the errors of Poe’s biographers. Although Eveleth and Poe never met, Poe’s letters to Eveleth were unusually candid, and Eveleth believed “that the natural tendency of my mind is into trains of thinking similar to Poe’s.” Outis’s prose style is a more tamped down, restrained version of Poe’s, though their modes of argument are similar.
All his life, Poe delighted in hiding behind multiple identities and inventing adventures and escapades for himself. In his life and his art, he was a master manipulator. In “The Colloquy of Edgar and Outis,” the writer Undine noted that Outis was “too good to be true,” a phantom foe offering Poe “arguments that he could easily shoot down, as well as giving him a preplanned excuse to repeat and expand upon his literary criticism.” Moreover, while purporting to criticize Poe, Outis flattered him, alluding to his “beautiful and powerful poem” and playing the same word game with Poe’s name as Poe had done earlier: “Mr. EDGAR A. POE. (Write it rather EDGAR, a Poet, and then it is right to a T.”
I agree that Outis was a useful invention for Poe, giving him an adversary in a public forum whom he could manipulate to his heart’s content. Far from a “pathetic wreck” on the verge of mental collapse, “thoroughly embarrassed” and “driven to his wit’s end to vindicate himself,” as his biographer Sidney Moss described him, Poe was an obsessive, self-promoting schemer, with a rapier-sharp wit, a love of intrigue, and an enjoyment of the joke that turned on itself like a Mobius strip. Indeed, these are the aspects of his character that speak so forcefully to our present day.
One could almost see Poe chuckling behind his moustache and his huge, accusing eyes—and behind the protean mask of Outis—as, in the March 29 Broadway Journal, he blamed Longfellow for “ridiculous, anonymous letters” and accused him of sending Outis and a certain Miss Walter (“a pretty little witch”) to attack him:
I, “knowing what I know and seeing what I have seen”—submitting in my own person to accusations of plagiarism for the very sins of this gentleman against myself—since I contented myself, nevertheless, with simply setting forth the merits of the poet in the strongest light, whenever an opportunity was afforded me, can it be considered either decorous or equitable on the part of Professor Longfellow to beset me, upon my first adventuring an infinitesimal sentence of dispraise, with ridiculous anonymous letters from his friends, and moreover, with malice prepense, to instigate against me the pretty little witch entitled “Miss Walter;” advising her and instructing her to pierce me to death with the needles of innumerable epigrams, rendered unnecessarily and therefore cruelly painful to my feelings, by being first carefully deprived of the point?
“Outis . . . has praised me even more than he has blamed,” Poe reminded us, should we prove too obtuse to perceive it for ourselves. Magnanimously, he avowed that he bore Outis no ill will, for Outis had (as was intended) afforded him a valuable opportunity:
In replying to him, my design has been to place fairly and distinctly before the literary public certain principles of criticism for which I have been long contending, and which, through sheer misrepresentation, were in danger of being misunderstood.
Throughout its six-week duration, the “Little Longfellow War” was a one-sided skirmish. If Poe had hoped to provoke Longfellow’s response in his own defense, he did not succeed. When beset by critics, both at this time and throughout his life, Longfellow sheathed his pen. That is not to say that Longfellow was not upset by Poe’s attacks. During that spring of 1845, he confessed privately in his journal that he “damns censorious Poe.” He could have been speaking of Poe when he wrote, “A young critic is like a boy with a gun; he fires at every living thing he sees. He thinks only of his own skill, not of the pain he is giving.”
Perhaps it was precisely because Longfellow was so pained by negative criticism—Poe’s and others’—that he made efforts to protect himself from its effects by creating a mental distance. In his Table Talk, a collection of his notes and aphorisms published posthumously, he noted, “A great part of happiness of life consists not in fighting battles but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.”
Longfellow could afford to ignore his critics. No other American poet, before or since, has enjoyed such great popular success or tremendous sales; today’s comparison would have to be to literary singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, or Leonard Cohen. Income from the sales of his poetry enabled Longfellow to retire from his Harvard professorship in his forties. Of greater concern to him than harsh criticism was the need for stricter international copyright law to prevent the piracy of his works overseas. He urged his close friend Congressman Charles Sumner to introduce this legislation, an effort in which he was joined by another close friend, Charles Dickens, who also suffered from copyright piracy. Samuel Longfellow, his brother and biographer, estimated that for want of an international copyright, the poet forfeited forty thousand dollars in income—in nineteenth-century dollars, a fortune.
As I have noted, plagiarism in the mid-nineteenth century had a different meaning than today. Then plagiarism might refer to any literary borrowing, whether conscious or unconscious. In this broad sense, every writer is a plagiarist, and every plagiarism is not a crime. Critics could not agree if ideas were copyrightable. Could an idea be attributed to a single author, and how specific or original did the idea have to be to “belong” to the author? Plagiarism scholar Sandi Leonard has suggested that once stricter international copyright laws were established, the conception of plagiarism began to shift to a demonstrable notion of copying verbatim, with intention. The establishment of a legal standard redefined our understanding of plagiarism, rather than the other way around.
For Poe, the point was not the justice of his accusations against Longfellow, but the incitement of a controversy and the attendant publicity. The wrong that he was seeking to redress was not literary theft, but the unfairness of life that decreed that Longfellow was rich and successful, and he was poor and obscure. Nevertheless, the charge of plagiarism was more than a convenience for Poe. Themes of plagiarism, influence, doubling, and imitation, which penetrated deeply into Poe’s psyche, are expressed in his troubling fictions and colored all of his literary and professional relationships. Poe’s hypersensitivity to this subject and the complexity of his twisted, contradictory responses continue to exert their fascination, offering insight into the demonic psyche, the individual in extremis.
Balance, proportion, and moderation were Longfellow’s qualities. But Longfellow, a lifelong student and translator of Dante, recognized a soul in torment, and he pitied Poe the man while appreciating his poetic talents. Author and critic William Winter (1836–1917), who befriended Longfellow during his Harvard days in the 1850s until Longfellow’s death thirty years later, recalled that the older poet kept a volume of Poe’s poems on his table, singling out for special praise Poe’s late poem “For Annie.” (When asked to recommend an epitaph for Poe’s 1857 memorial, Longfellow chose the line, “The fever called ‘Living’ / is conquered at last” from “For Annie.”)
After Poe’s death, Longfellow provided financial support to Poe’s aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm. Taking the long view, he said to Winter, “I never answered Mr. Poe’s attacks and I would advise you now, at the outset of your literary life, never to take notice of any attacks that may be made upon you. Let them all pass. My works seemed to give him much trouble, first and last; but Mr. Poe is dead and gone, and I am alive and still writing—and that is the end of the matter.”
_______________________
Perhaps it was precisely because Longfellow was so pained by negative criticism—Poe’s and others’—that he made efforts to protect himself from its effects by creating a mental distance. In his Table Talk, a collection of his notes and aphorisms published posthumously, he noted, “A great part of happiness of life consists not in fighting battles but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.”
Longfellow could afford to ignore his critics. No other American poet, before or since, has enjoyed such great popular success or tremendous sales; today’s comparison would have to be to literary singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, or Leonard Cohen. Income from the sales of his poetry enabled Longfellow to retire from his Harvard professorship in his forties. Of greater concern to him than harsh criticism was the need for stricter international copyright law to prevent the piracy of his works overseas. He urged his close friend Congressman Charles Sumner to introduce this legislation, an effort in which he was joined by another close friend, Charles Dickens, who also suffered from copyright piracy. Samuel Longfellow, his brother and biographer, estimated that for want of an international copyright, the poet forfeited forty thousand dollars in income—in nineteenth-century dollars, a fortune.
As I have noted, plagiarism in the mid-nineteenth century had a different meaning than today. Then plagiarism might refer to any literary borrowing, whether conscious or unconscious. In this broad sense, every writer is a plagiarist, and every plagiarism is not a crime. Critics could not agree if ideas were copyrightable. Could an idea be attributed to a single author, and how specific or original did the idea have to be to “belong” to the author? Plagiarism scholar Sandi Leonard has suggested that once stricter international copyright laws were established, the conception of plagiarism began to shift to a demonstrable notion of copying verbatim, with intention. The establishment of a legal standard redefined our understanding of plagiarism, rather than the other way around.
For Poe, the point was not the justice of his accusations against Longfellow, but the incitement of a controversy and the attendant publicity. The wrong that he was seeking to redress was not literary theft, but the unfairness of life that decreed that Longfellow was rich and successful, and he was poor and obscure. Nevertheless, the charge of plagiarism was more than a convenience for Poe. Themes of plagiarism, influence, doubling, and imitation, which penetrated deeply into Poe’s psyche, are expressed in his troubling fictions and colored all of his literary and professional relationships. Poe’s hypersensitivity to this subject and the complexity of his twisted, contradictory responses continue to exert their fascination, offering insight into the demonic psyche, the individual in extremis.
Balance, proportion, and moderation were Longfellow’s qualities. But Longfellow, a lifelong student and translator of Dante, recognized a soul in torment, and he pitied Poe the man while appreciating his poetic talents. Author and critic William Winter (1836–1917), who befriended Longfellow during his Harvard days in the 1850s until Longfellow’s death thirty years later, recalled that the older poet kept a volume of Poe’s poems on his table, singling out for special praise Poe’s late poem “For Annie.” (When asked to recommend an epitaph for Poe’s 1857 memorial, Longfellow chose the line, “The fever called ‘Living’ / is conquered at last” from “For Annie.”)
After Poe’s death, Longfellow provided financial support to Poe’s aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm. Taking the long view, he said to Winter, “I never answered Mr. Poe’s attacks and I would advise you now, at the outset of your literary life, never to take notice of any attacks that may be made upon you. Let them all pass. My works seemed to give him much trouble, first and last; but Mr. Poe is dead and gone, and I am alive and still writing—and that is the end of the matter.”
_______________________
Author’s Note: I am grateful to the Edgar Allan Poe Society for making Poe’s criticism, along with all of his writings, available digitally. In particular:
Imitation -- Plagiarism -- Mr. Poe’s Reply to the Letter of Outis . . .” (March 8, 1845, text “A” — Broadway Journal) (Includes the reply of “Outis” from the Evening Mirror, March 1, 1845)
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh03.htm
[Text: Edgar Allan Poe, "A Continuation of the voluminous History of the Little Longfellow War," from the Broadway Journal, March 15, 1845.]
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh04.htm
[Text: Edgar Allan Poe, "More of the Voluminous History of the Little Longfellow War," from Broadway Journal, Mr. Poe's Third Chapter of Reply to the Letter of Outis.
“More of the Voluminous History of the Little Longfellow War . . .”
https://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh05.htm
(March 22, 1845, text “A” — Broadway Journal)
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh05.htm
Imitation — Plagiarism — The conclusion of Mr. Poe’s Reply to the Letter of Outis” (March 29, 1845, text “A” — Broadway Journal)
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh06.htm
“Imitation — Plagiarism — Postscript” (April 5, 1845, text “A” — Broadway Journal)
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh07.htm
*
I also consulted the following books and articles:
Givens, Charity Lea “Poe’s Poisoned Pen: A Study of Fiction as Vendetta,” Liberty University, M.A. Thesis, 2009.
Leonard, Sandi, “Notes on Poe’s Little Longfellow War,”https://plagiarius.wordpress.com/about/, 2012.
Life of Henry Wadworth Longfellow With Extracts From His Journals And Correspondence. Vol. I. edited by Samuel Longfellow. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1887.
Final Memorials of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Vol. II, edited by Samuel Longfellow. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1887.
Undine, http://worldofpoe.blogspot.com, esp. “The Colloquy of Edgar and Outis.” 2012. Among other sources, she helpfully quotes Moss, Sidney Phil. Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of his Literary Milieu. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1963.
Velella Rob, http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-parlor-poet-vs-the-raven-in-a-battle-of-literary-statues Oct. 3, 2014.
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh03.htm
[Text: Edgar Allan Poe, "A Continuation of the voluminous History of the Little Longfellow War," from the Broadway Journal, March 15, 1845.]
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh04.htm
[Text: Edgar Allan Poe, "More of the Voluminous History of the Little Longfellow War," from Broadway Journal, Mr. Poe's Third Chapter of Reply to the Letter of Outis.
“More of the Voluminous History of the Little Longfellow War . . .”
https://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh05.htm
(March 22, 1845, text “A” — Broadway Journal)
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh05.htm
Imitation — Plagiarism — The conclusion of Mr. Poe’s Reply to the Letter of Outis” (March 29, 1845, text “A” — Broadway Journal)
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh06.htm
“Imitation — Plagiarism — Postscript” (April 5, 1845, text “A” — Broadway Journal)
http://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/bj45lh07.htm
*
I also consulted the following books and articles:
Givens, Charity Lea “Poe’s Poisoned Pen: A Study of Fiction as Vendetta,” Liberty University, M.A. Thesis, 2009.
Leonard, Sandi, “Notes on Poe’s Little Longfellow War,”https://plagiarius.wordpress.com/about/, 2012.
Life of Henry Wadworth Longfellow With Extracts From His Journals And Correspondence. Vol. I. edited by Samuel Longfellow. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1887.
Final Memorials of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Vol. II, edited by Samuel Longfellow. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1887.
Undine, http://worldofpoe.blogspot.com, esp. “The Colloquy of Edgar and Outis.” 2012. Among other sources, she helpfully quotes Moss, Sidney Phil. Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of his Literary Milieu. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1963.
Velella Rob, http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-parlor-poet-vs-the-raven-in-a-battle-of-literary-statues Oct. 3, 2014.
Anne Whitehouse is the author of poetry collections: The Surveyor’s Hand, Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, Outside from the Inside, and Steady, as well as the art chapbooks, Surrealist Muse (about Leonora Carrington), Escaping Lee Miller, Frida, Being Ruth Asawa, and Adrienne Fidelin Restored. She is the author of a novel, Fall Love.