Blair puts Emily Dickinson to music at Detroit’s Institute of Arts for The Big Read -

Tie the Strings to my Life,

My Lord,

Then, I am ready to go!

Just a look at the Horses -

Rapid! That will do!

Put me in on the firmest

side -

So I shall never fall -

For we must ride to the

Judgment -

And it’s partly, down Hill –

But never I mind the steepest -

And never I mind the Sea -

Held fast in Everlasting Race -

By my own Choice, and Thee –

Goodbye to the Life I used to live -

And the World I used to know -

And kiss the Hills, for me,

just once -

Now – I am ready to go!

-Emily Dickinson, written about summer 1862

poem appears with ED’s original line breaks

Printed here on the poet’s 181st birthday

I set out many years ago to find Margaret Maher

- to have this housekeeper’s life and longings come into focus.

- to see Margaret Maher in as sharp a focus as that of her employer Emily Dickinson.

Using mixed media installation I sought

to create a social moment

a place and time for two women – maid and mistress – to inhabit.

At first I couldn’t “see” Margaret.

What came first was the work environment

the tasks of everyday life

that Margaret and Emily were engaged in

- together and side by side .

It turns out I needed Emily

– to help jiggle the developer tray:

- run fingers over the imaging paper

until out of that murky fluid emerged the persons I was seeking.

When Margaret’s co-workers as well as Emily and her peers came forward:

Margaret, Betty, Dennis, Amos, Stephen, Henry, Tom, Charles, Delia . . .

I was able to pick them out as individuals – and find the story

And of course in doing so I found a part of myself.

How did I do this?

Through book-making and inviting into the investigation the men and women who today clean the Emily Dickinson Museum, tend its gardens, and do the minor repairs.

In the 1990s they included Judith Sherman Atwood, John R. Bator, Richard Beauregard, Robin Dagenais, and Henry Paul Hebert.

I conducted a long distance “interview” from California to their Massachusetts workplace with questions such as:

“what is the nature of your work?”

“how long have you done it?”

“what is the poetry or art of your work?”

Their responses became the hand-sewn books - Art of Service (covers pictured).

These books resembled Emily’s own hand-stitched poem books.

After Emily Dickinson’s household came under the capable hands of their first long term maid, Emily began grouping her poems and copying them into small booklets.

Emily bound these with thread that was hand-tied.

Or as maid Margaret Maher remembered years later:

They were done up in small booklets,

probably 12 or 14 tied up with a string

On a March afternoon in 1997 Art of Service came off the Vandercook press at  Dale Going’s Em Press in Mill Valley, California.

I took needle and thread to bind the pages of the first copy.

I cried when I held the first sewn book.

Margaret Maher and the many “unseen” Dickinson workers

came closer when Judy, John, Robin, Richard and Herbert signed my copy of Art of Service.

Come soon: Art of Service – part II …

Wow -

New endorsement of Maid as Muse by Peter Quinn – novelist, political historian, and foremost chronicler of New York City:

“Maid as Muse is a landmark work of historical revelation that unearths truths so glaringly significant it seems improbable they could have been ignored — yet ignored they were.

Generations of Emily Dickinson scholars and devoted admirers (myself included)  reveled in every facet of her life, studied every nuance, and savored every detail. But somehow the web of domestic relationships that sustained the Dickinson household and was so integral to the poet’s achievement was barely noticed and rarely remarked on.

Aífe Murray’s book changes all that. More than a breathtakingly original investigation that alters our perception of Dickinson’s everyday existence, Maid as Muse restores to the historical record the lives of those most often forgotten or passed over”—immigrants, women, the working class.

Murray opens our eyes (and our hearts and minds) to the complex interaction of gender, class, race, and ethnicity in the Dickinson home in Amherst as well as in the wider context of 19th-century New England.

She gives voice to the voiceless, and enriches and deepens our understanding of Emily Dickinson and the world of which she was part.

Maid as Muse is a rare, wonderful, and stunningly original book.

I am in awe of what Aífe Murray has done.”

Thank you Peter!

Peter is the author of Looking for Jimmy, Banished Children of Eve, Hour of the Cat, and the newly released The Man Who Never Returned.

Read his essay review – published in  Commonweal - of Maid as Muse, Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat, and Kim Nielsen’s Beyond the Miracle Worker.

We paused before a

House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground -

The Roof was scarcely

visible -

The Cornice – in the Ground -

Since then – ’tis Centuries -

and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the

Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity -

-Emily Dickinson, about late 1862 (with her original line breaks); last stanzas of “Because I could not / stop for death”

When I couldn’t find photographs or letters of the Dickinson servants – or other evidences of their having lived or breathed in the high ceiling interior of the Dickinson Homestead – I headed to the cemetery.

No more than fifty feet from the fenced plot, pictured below, where Emily is buried with her parents and sister in West Cemetery, I found the graves of housekeepers, stablemen, gardeners, and others who in some way worked for Emily’s family.

It was a February evening in 2008 and the sun was setting in Amherst when I found the grave of Betty Ann Brown Scott, an African American woman who had cooked for Emily’s famly in the early 1850s.

Not far away were the graves of the Jackson family. Patriarch Henry Jackson, a teamster by trade, made himself indispensable to three generations of Dickinson men.

And Charles Thompson who worked for the Dickinson men, college treasurers, keeping Amherst College boilers stoked and in any number of ways at the Homestead. His wife, also African American, served at Homestead parties.

Others, like laborer Tom Kelley, are buried not far away in a Catholic cemetery in Plainville (Hadley, Massachusetts) established by St. Brigid’s Church of Amherst.

Others still are buried in the Catholic cemetery in Northampton (St. Mary’s Cemetery) like gardener Horace Church’s family and maid-of-all-work Margaret Maher.

Somewhere on the grounds of St. Mary’s are the remains of Irish immigrant Margaret O Brien Lawler, the first long term Dickinson housekeeper.

Margaret O Brien arrived by 1856 when the newly renovated and expanded Homestead – or the Dickinson family’s rise in the world – necessitated help.

She stayed until she married her way out of service, to Stephen Lawler, in October 1865 – to the dismay of one extremely active poet:

Besides wiping the dishes for Margaret, I wash them now, while she becomes Mrs. Lawler, vicarious papa to four previous babes. Must she not be an adequate bride? I winced at her loss, because I was in the habit of her, and even a new rolling pin has an embarrassing element, but to all except anguish, the mind soon adjusts

It took three years but the motivated – and frustrated – writer found a replacement for Margaret O Brien.

Her name was Margaret Maher but Emily Dickinson called her “Maggie.

In fact once Margaret Maher was a fixture of the poet’s household, Emily professed wanting to change her own name, taking her maid’s:

“‘Maggie’ is a warm name. I shall like to take it.”

The Lamp burns sure – within -

‘Tho’ Serfs – supply the Oil -

It matters not the busy

Wick -

At her phosphoric toil!

The Slave – forgets – to fill -

The Lamp – burns golden – on -

Unconscious that the oil

is out -

As that the Slave – is gone.

-Emily Dickinson, written in about the latter half of 1861

The 2010 book about Emily Dickinson’s housekeepers, stablemen, gardeners, and laborers – Maid as Muse -  is part of my larger mixed form project – Kitchen Table Poetics – realized as installation, performance, maps, poetry, essay, artists’ books & book.

My silkscreened Japanese baseball shirt, shown here, with text and clothespin is one piece from Kitchen Table Poetics.

In this “book” the segments of a baseball shirt become pages.

(Nomura, see below, is the name of one of the world’s largest stock brokerages – appropriate for a family, the Dickinsons, who made money through shrewd investments and whose house smelled of rice straw. Tatami, used to wrap their imported goods, became Homestead floor coverings.)

Silkscreened on one page is of the Dickinson poem – above – “The Lamp burns sure – within -”

On the other side of the silkscreened shirt – or book cover - is an 1891 letter written by Dickinson maid-of-all-work Margaret Maher to Emily Dickinson’s cousin, Clara Newman Turner.

I once gave all my talks wearing this text-clothespin-baseball shirt – especially to talk about how the words “slave” and “serf” are elided in the above Dickinson poem.

Servant and serf had a sting in the 19th century for those who were domestic  or household workers.

It was akin to being a slave.

The poem’s narrator-writer, dependent on the invisible slave and serf, depicts the lamp as representing the creative force, that inner-driven spark which burns no matter what.

It’s not affected by ministrations of serf, the fuel itself, or the wick.

It is unaffected by a forgetful slave who in the end turns out to be not forgetful but escaped.

Toward the end of her life Margaret Maher, after over 40 years as a maid, no longer signed letters with her family name.

She identified herself by her employment and possession by her employer.

In the upper corner of the shirt you may be able to make out the words Margaret Maher used to close her 1891 letter:

Miss. Emily.s and

Vinnia.s

Maggie

Embedded in the sidewalk of New York City -

A plaque of this 1862 Emily Dickinson poem:

A word is dead, when it is said
Some say -
I say it just begins to live
That day

Where the word is scrubbed -

by Maid as Muse author Aífe Murray -

It just begins to live that way -

(Happy Labor Day)

I’ll never forget watching the news the day that fire hoses were turned on school children in Birmingham, Alabama.

Children my age were using non-violence to desegregate that city and in turn our country.

100 pounds of pressure. Children swept down the street. Knocked to the ground trying to withstand the force. Some hiding behind trees.

Then the police turned the attack dogs on them.

I suppose that’s why I’m disappointed – like Nelson George of the NYT - that the film version of Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help gives a “rosy glow” to the conditions and struggles of Jim Crow Jackson.

The aspirations of the main African American characters Aibileen and Minny aren’t central to the screen. Nor their context.

Okay something has to get sacrificed when adapting a book. But isn’t all of that key to these characters? Aibileen – the budding writer herself. The threats to life.

Underplaying the era’s violence soft peddles the courage it took for these two women to participate in Skeeter Phelan’s book. That was a big miss.

But what Mr. George doesn’t address in his fine NYT piece is the film’s clumsy handling of class – which Stockett addresses head on. Again, the movie misstepped.

The book scene I’m referring to is where, much to the shock of Minny, a white woman literally goes to bat for her. Celia lays out cold a man coming after Minny in a moment of class solidarity not bounded by the binaries of race.

The film cuts that scene – losing the complexity of their relationship – which creates a pivotal turn for Minny and leaves Celia to languish in full buffoonery.

Instead, the film version of Celia – of Sugar Ditch who can’t find her “place” in Jackson (Mississippi) society due to class – shows her gratitude by making a meal for her cooking-tutor Minny. A puff pastry piece. Too bad.

Here’s where it gets personal.

Full disclosure: One of my grandfathers was a socialist and the other was a Republican. One man worshiped Eugene Victor Debs and the other was disappointed when FDR became president.

Yet neither of these Irish American men were blind to the commonality they shared with others – whether they were new immigrants just off the boat, not yet speakers of English, or long time Americans of Native or African slave descent.

In fact both of my grandfathers fought politically on behalf of those common workingman interests. My grandfathers – socialist and republican – knew that their economic interests lie with their immigrant, Native, and African American neighbors.

My father was son of the socialist. As a teenager he witnessed accelerating KKK attacks on his family because his widowed mother dared to build a Catholic church in their New Jersey town.

My grandmother was not intimidated – even when the Klan attempted to burn her house to the ground.

The church she was intent on seeing built, that stoked KKK ire, still thrives in Bergen County, New Jersey. (My current writing project is about this story; my grandmother pictured right and below.)

As a result of his father’s socialism and his mother’s defiance of Klan racism, my father’s long life was animated by civil rights. He became another white working class civil rights activist. (My grandmother, uncle, and father L-R pictured below.)

That’s why I have a personal stake in not losing the scene where Celia downs the intruder about to attack Minny.

We need to see that – we white people need reminding – while the racist right wing normalizes itself in US and European politics.

I don’t want to forget the civil rights struggle – extreme acts of courage – or the context to The Help.

Thanks to my thoughtful son, who culled them for me, I’m making my way through the 14 episode PBS documentary Their Eyes on the Prize.

That’s my antidote for the film’s oversights and the existence of Marine Le Pen, John Tanton, racist Norwegian massacres, and groups like American Coalition for Immigration Reform.

Like a tree that’s standing by the water . . .

Stood Up to be Counted against the Klan

He ate and

drank the

precious Words -

His Spirit grew

robust -

He knew no more

that he was poor,

Nor that his

frame was

Dust -

He danced

along the dingy

Days

And this Bequest

of Wings

Was but a Book -

What Liberty

A loosened Spirit

brings -

-Emily Dickinson, late 1882 (with her original line breaks)

The initiating spark for this poem appears to be the illness besetting the poet’s own housekeeper.

That real bout with typhoid fever led Emily to think about how language is so sustaining it is capable of providing uplift to a sick patient.

Composed late in 1882 this poem was written on the reverse of a letter from maid-of-all-work Margaret Maher.

Margaret wrote to her poet-mistress while being cared for by her own family while ill. (She is believed to have lived-in at the Dickinson Homestead.)

During that illness -  in September or October 1882 – Margaret was nursed by her sister, Mary Kelley, at the family home,”Kelley Square,” which is about a quarter mile from the Dickinson Homestead.

The letter, below, reports Margaret’s uncertain recovery:

Some times I

think I dont be

sick at all and

the Next time

I am sick again

give my love to

Mother and tell

her

I miss her and

I will sone be

home to her how

is the colds

I hope ye are better

When Margaret was out of the danger zone, in October 1882, the relieved Emily responded with this playful note:

The missing Maggie is much mourned, and I am going out for “black” to the nearest store.

All are very naughty, and I am naughtiest of all.

The pussies dine on sherry now, and humming-bird cutlets.

The invalid hen took dinner with me, but a hen like Dr. T[aylor]’s horse soon drove her away. I am very busy picking up stems and stamens as the hollyhocks leave their clothes around.

What shall I send my weary Maggie? Pillows or fresh brooks?

Her grieved Mistress.

The images, right and above right, (Emily’s head with strawberries) are of a related apron I silkscreened.

The writing – silkscreened on the apron strings – include lines from the above poem “He ate and/ drank the / precious Words -”

If you look closely at the full image of that apron, above, you may be able to see words from the 1882 letter and poem exchange: “and this bequest” and “he danced along the dingy days.”

What has always interested me – in the relationship between the household staff and Emily Dickinson – are the places where maid and mistress intersect.

One selected a piece of stationery and wrote. The other held it in her hand, read it, wrote.

This poem is tactile evidence. Of their interchange, exchange. Of their presence to each other.

I made the apron to create a social moment - so that I could see them.

Have both maid and mistress come into the room.

To see Margaret Maher as clearly as I could see her famous employer.

Emily’s head, on this apron, is part of a larger, full body, screened image. I made it as one side of a soft doll – at the prototype stage – of the two women: Emily and Margaret.

Two sides of a coin.

. . . Look for me “over the fence” in apron.

+++

Key to aprons from top of page (collection of Aífe Murray):

1. Handmade apron by Polish immigrant woman who was a resident of the Philadelphia Poor Farm circa 1930s. Gift to Grace Mawson, another Poor Farm resident.

2. “Over the fence – strawberries – grow”: silkscreened apron with cross stitched berries by Aífe Murray

3. Child’s apron of gossamer with red cotton waistband and strings handmade by Grace Mawson for her granddaughter Aífe Murray

4. Detail of “Over the fence – strawberries – grow” apron with cross stitched berries silkscreened by Aífe Murray

5. Crocheted apron with grosgrain waistband and strings

6. Waist band of handmade apron by Polish immigrant woman at Philadelphia Poor Farm

7. Lace hem of handmade apron by Polish immigrant woman at Philadelphia Poor Farm

After three weeks at Hawthornden, I finally took a day off, at the encouragement of the other writing fellows, and went to the modern art galleries of the Scottish National Museum.

The rain was intermittent-deluge that day as I made my way beyond Edinburgh’s city center to two large villas that hold the modern art collection.

I had a great urge to see large scale canvases with abstract art, preferably something 1960s bold. “Olded-out, are you?” quipped Castle Administrator Hamish Robinson as I set off that morning.

Once there, I discovered that the museum had just taken down two large exhibitions and had not yet mounted their next shows. Because there were fewer pieces to see, there wasn’t the typical museum anxiety about racing through in order to not miss a thing. Thus, the paintings and sculpture I did see, I observed closely (and enjoyed immensely especially Howard Hodgkin and Hamish Fulton & taking my cappuccino opposite Joan Eardly’s Catterline in Winter at a table set between the towering legs of an Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture).

One of the conceptual pieces I was most taken with was an installation (above) by Nathan Coley set up on the lawn. Originally part of a series, erected in and around the town of Stirling, it stands six meters high, with old style theater lighting, proclaiming:

There Will Be

No Miracles

Here

This amusing piece, set deep in the green lawns of the Dean Gallery was inspired by a 17th century royal proclamation made in a French town – the site of frequent miracles. I’ve made my own installations and was drawn to and energized by this simple and evocative piece.

“The more I walk

the more I write”

During my month-long writing fellowship, I sometimes walked (courtesy of lifts from Mr. Robinson) the rib of the Pentland Hills to “see” the spine of the story; to unearth it – as the grazing sheep were exposing the contours of the land.

Mostly, I stayed closer to home and walked the Tyne Esk trail or sat on a stone bench of the Castle Walk with my note book scribbling furiously or in the wing chair set before the window in Milosz, lost in 1920s New Jersey even as I saw a falcon dive through the Esk gorge.

On my last morning at Hawthornden Castle, after my bags were packed and waiting in the front hall, I stood in the doorway of the empty room – the world I had inhabited for a month – staring at the wing chair faced out over the river, pointing toward the Hewan and Maidan Castle.

I was rooted to the spot, even as the hands of the clock swept round and it was nearly time to be whisked to the airport. Something extraordinarily powerful and surprising had taken place.

What was most astonishing is that at the bottom of the tartan staircase, packed in my bags, were 27,000 new words to my next book. Equally astonishing is this feeling of being “in the chute” – that I can hardly write fast enough. There will be miracles here.

Off to the south banks of the River North Esk that flows below Hawthornden – pictured – in Lasswade, Midlothian, Kingdom of Scotland.

I’ll be working in a cave or tower of the Hawthornden Castle - once the home of poet William Drummond (1585-1649) – thanks to a writing fellowship supported by Drue Heinz.

Hoping to catch a spark from the Scots-Lallan (Burns) or the music of RL Stevenson, CA Duffy, or Don Paterson.

If not, perhaps something of Suhayl Saadi or Trainspotting will rub off.

Not Glasgow, but it will do. Haggis: here I come.