Madge McKeithen

A Firm Persuasion

November 3, 2014

Saturday, November 1, 2014, at Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital’s Art Ability, several hundred art lovers interested in works created by individuals with physical and cognitive challenges had the opportunity to view the work of Charles Blackwell read more

Tags: art, art and medicine, ArtAbility, blind, Bryn Mawr Rehab, Charles Blackwell, improv, intellectual disabilities, jazz, Melanie Vi Levy, poet, Robynn Takayama, traumatic brain injury, William Blake

On Her Plate

October 8, 20143 comments

“Let me tell you what’s on my plate.”

It’s Mom on the phone, from her hospital bed in NC to me at my desk in NJ, and I think, Ah, she wants to talk about her upcoming pacemaker procedure. read more

Tags: Aging, Atul Gawande, Families, Healthcare, Kezar Lake, Medicine, mothers, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Sarah Manguso, Two Kinds of Decay

sheen of stoma, pith of summer, and a sky grown clear

June 6, 2014

MoMA’s sculpture garden has Isa Genzken’s 28-foot rose and the New York Botanical Garden, (May through September) “Great American Gardens of the Early 20th Century read more

Tags: Eavan Boland, Edna St. Vincent Millay, gardens, Isa Genzken, Museum of Modern Art, New York Botanical Garden, Ruth Stone, summer, women

Crocuses, UConn, and Derek Jeter

April 12, 20141 comment

Typically around this time of year crocuses incite a gasp of delight, and they did again this year — just a few days ago in the backyard of the rented house to which I moved a few months ago and the next day, more robust ones, read more

Tags: amazement, baseball, basketball, Breanna Stewart, Derek Jeter, essays, Floyd Skloot, form, heroes, hybrid form, lyric essays, New School, nonfiction, Peter Cooley, poetry, sports, standards, UConn women's basketball, writing

Stillness, Nothing-Happening Moments

April 10, 2014

In March at a beach in North Carolina, a group of people I have known for a long time gathered read more

Tags: Akhil Sharma, Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter, experience, Family Life, fiction, Kawabata, memory, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, senses, stillness, writing

Onset of Spring?

February 1, 2014

Most of this post — Robin Robertson’s poem, the photographs taken in November in Frenchtown, NJ — was compiled in a moment of late November pause, read more

Tags: Calendars, family, February 1, Festivals, Frenchtown, Gaelic, Gerald Stern, holidays, Imbolc, NJ, North Carolina, poetry, Robin Robertson, Samhain, Spring, winter

Waiting Ahead

November 1, 2013

Amy Bagwell is a force for poetry in public spaces in Charlotte, NC. Spurred first by her love of poetry and her passion that it be out there for everyone to read read more

Tags: A. R. Ammons, Amy Bagwell, art and design, Billy Collins, Central Piedmond Community College, Charlotte, Charlotte Center City Partners, Jon Pineda, Leiden 101 Murals, NC, poetry, Poetry In Motion, Poetry Society of America, public art, Queens University, Wall Poems of Charlotte