That ‘social text,’ that fleshy real world was inhabited by maids, laundry workers, seamstresses, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, basket weavers, laborers, stablemen–all of whom Emily knew by name. The poet may have traded on stereotypes (what Folsom and Price call vortex words) that telegraphed charged images to her readers. What’s to be made of Emily’s relationships to the people behind these stereotypes? This was the social context of her art-making, the whole roster of people who make the work possible and ‘fuel the fantasy of independence. Ironically, it is this very support that allows the practice of art making to appear as the ultimate expression of individual freedom.

To learn more about Aífe Murray’s work, see her web site.

Murray, Aífe. Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson’s Life and Language. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010.

The twinned experiences of reading and thinking about poetry and poetics within the multilingual flow of heard languages in travel has got me thinking about language, language use, and language learning and teaching in new ways. It also has me wondering about the difficulty of learning and teaching other (“foreign”) languages — and wondering why we seem so insistent as students and teachers about this notion of difficulty. All around me, inside me too, the ubiquity of code-switching in the multilingual flow is primary. Inner life, in own words, English and Japanese. Copenhagen’ dominant background is Danish, bilingual (Danish/English) signage, and code-switching on demand, with English loan words sprinkled through everyone’s speech no matter their origins, mother tongue(s), and multi-lingual competencies. This seems — at least in over-heard casual conversation and public interactions — the same for everyone: Americans to British to Danes to Germans and Swedes, Africans, Thai, Turkish, …. all. In global business and travel this seems merely necessary and normal. We need to communicate with each other for instrumental purposes and so without worrying about the finer points of how to develop our language learning strategies, reading skills, improve our vocabulary learning techniques, etc. we just get on with language life, step by everyday step.

If a finer (more discriminatory) understanding of difficulty in language/language use is to be encountered and embraced, won’t this happen in the domains of the arts and sciences? For example, say, in poetics, philosophy, or computer programming? If there is a point to my meditation it is not to attack the anxieties and concerns of language learners and teachers, but to seek a better understanding of our real responsibilities through a more rigorous analysis of how we handicap ourselves in our educational institutions.

Note: McGann, Jerome. The Point Is To Change It: Poetry and Criticism in the Continuing Present, University of Alabama Press, 2007.

One of the way she does this is using multiple screens. In The Hour of Prayer, for example, she uses four screens, sometimes showing different scenes, sometimes show the same scene, and at other times showing in two or more screens panoramic views. The Hour of Prayer is scripted in English and the narration done by an actor, the text and images complementing each other, but the text and the image sequences do not lead viewers to closure, rather requiring us to construct our own readings of the narrative. She concludes the catalog interview by saying,

I don’t think my works are especially painterly – no. What probably comes from the art side is that I trust the audience’s ability to see, hear, and think.

More than anything, Ahtila’s installations have become poetic mysteries for me. I knew after my first visit yesterday that I would have to return, and would return again and again, just as I re-read my favorite poems. Made my second visit today, but will be moving on the UK tomorrow, so have to mediate on the stored up images, and on the catalog stills from here on out.
I’ve made a small effort to learn more about Ahtila’s work on the web. There are a few good things out there:

1. an Adrian Searle article from The Guardian (2002);
2. a BBC Wales piece reporting on The Hour of Prayer and the Artes Mundi award; and,
3. most impressive of all, her collected Cinematic Works on DVD, and a study of her works by Taru Elfving, et. al. – both from Crystal Eye, Ltd. – are available from Amazon.

Here, in “Tenderly #6″ — and I’m still struggling to understand how this poem works — alliteration, enjambment, and the syncopation of the text achieve a unity that is as fascinating in its precise constraints as the soaring meditation on language, politics, and history through [a sort of] window on Cheney’s quail shooting incident.

Great stuff!