Susan McKeown was recently interviewed on Madness Radio.
Is poetry the way to truly understand madness? Do rituals and music — such as Ireland’s tradition of keening — have the power to heal emotional suffering? Susan McKeown, Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter and folklorist, supported her partner through an extreme state. She began a journey to uncover intergenerational trauma in her family and in the history of her native Ireland, and was inspired to take poems about madness — by Anne Sexton, Theodore Roethke, James Clarence Mangan, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others — and set them to music in her album “Singing in the Dark.”
Is poetry the way to truly understand madness? Do rituals and music — such as Ireland’s tradition of keening — have the power to heal emotional suffering? Susan McKeown, Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter and folklorist, supported her partner through an extreme state. She began a journey to uncover intergenerational trauma in her family and in the history of her native Ireland, and was inspired to take poems about madness — by Anne Sexton, Theodore Roethke, James Clarence Mangan, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others — and set them to music in her album “Singing in the Dark.”
