Intertwining Irish history and generations of Irish American family memories in a work of
polyphonic literature based on the rhythms of ancient Irish Poetry, the imagined lost Irish Sonata,
the madrigal, streams and fountains, and Irish song, From Ireland with Letters is an epic
electronic manuscript told in the public space of the Internet. It interweaves the stories of Walter
Power -- who came to America as an Irish slave on The Goodfellow in 1654, stolen from his family by
Cromwell's soldiers and sold in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when he was 14 years old
-- and his descendant, 19th century Irish American sculptor Hiram Powers, who grew up on a Vermont
farm and moved to Florence, Italy, where his work played a symbolic role in the fight against
African American slavery in America.
The Prologue, Begin with the Arrival and passage,
premiered in June 2012 at the author's retrospective
--
http://dtc-wsuv.org/elit/elo2012/elo2012/Malloy.html
-- at the 2012 Conference of the Electronic Literature Organization in Morgantown, West Virginia.
And From Ireland with Letters was on display on the plasma screen
at FILE 2012: Electronic Language International Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil,
July 16 - August 19, 2012. Part IV, fiddler's passage, was composed in the summer of 2012,
and part V, Junction of Several Trails, is currently in progress.
The role of displacement and disrupted tradition in the work of contemporary Irish authors [1] is
paralleled in this polyphonic Irish American electronic manuscript.
Each part is separate and written in a different structure and tempo, but the whole is integrated by themes
introduced in the opening Prologue.
Although the workings of each section are different, as a general rule, the work can be read
either by waiting for the text to change on its own (as if watching a film or listening
to a piece of music) or by clicking on any lexia, in which case the reader takes control of
how the story is explored in the manner of hypertext fiction. The authoring system is set forth in the
score for fiddler's passage and the
score for the "Sinfornia" to Junction of Several Trails.
The story is true, but the characters who tell it in From Ireland with Letters are fictional.
Walter Power's story is told by his descendant Máire Powers, an Irish American fiddler who is
writing a lay about 17th century Ireland and Irish slavery in America; Hiram Powers' story is
told by 19th century art historian Liam O'Brien, who is researching the sculptor's life and work.
The documentation of what happened in Ireland from 1649-1654 has been acquired with research and
reading, particularly in books written during the Gaelic Revival in Ireland. These books are a
treasure of Irish history, and the discovery and reading of such texts is an integral part of this work.
This trail of library discovery and the parallel trail of the influence of early music, fiddle music and
Irish poetry on the interface of a poetic electronic manuscript are
documented in the From Ireland with Letters writer's notebooks at:
notebook for fiddler's passage
notebook for Begin with the Arrival and passage
The sculptor Hiram Powers, whose work The Greek Slave was influential in the fight
against slavery was the descendent of Walter Power's fourth child Thomas. The writer of this work,
Judy Malloy, is the descendent of his first child, William. The pursuit of this story began years ago,
when her grandfather, Walter Powers, told her the story of Hiram Powers.
The title of this work is taken from Saint Patrick's Confessio, where the words are
"from Ireland with innumerable letters". Having escaped from slavery in Ireland, Saint Patrick,
had a vision of a man from Ireland asking him -- with many letters -- to return to Erin. In his
Letter To Coroticus, Patrick was also one of the first people whose words against slavery
are recorded.
More background information is available in the "about" files for each section.
