This project – Kitchen Table Poetics — takes as its signature figures maid Margaret Maher and her poet Emily Dickinson.

It began when I was standing in the library’s main reading room* wondering how Emily Dickinson could have been so prolific. In answer to my question a Dickinson biography I was holding fell open to a photograph of three servants. I ran headlong into this project.

In 1997 I created and led my first public walking tour of the town of Amherst, Massachusetts from the perspective of the Dickinson servants under the auspices of the Mead Art Museum which had mounted the exhibition Language as Object: Emily Dickinson and Contemporary Art.

A servant descendant and the house cleaners and landscape gardeners,  working currently at the Emily Dickinson Homestead, helped me narrate the tour. They also collaborated with me on the artist book Art of Service which became part of my installation, Pantry DRAWer, for the Mead Museum exhibit.

I re-created the servant walking tour while in residence at the Emily Dickinson Museum in October 2004, re-naming it Margaret Maher’s Amherst.  I also met with the museum guides to help them integrate servants into their tours.

I have received support for this project from the Northeast Modern Language Association, Money for Women/Deming Foundation, The Irish American Cultural Institute, and the Emily Dickinson International Society (Scholar in Amherst 2007) . I was fortunate to have been made an affiliated scholar with Stanford’s Institute Research On Women and Gender and awarded a residency at Djerassi where much writing and research were conducted.

--Aife Murray