Performance Art
- Mar 26
- 1 min read
Updated: Apr 1
Marjorie Maddox
-Performance Art in Trafalgar Square, Sheila Legge, 1936
Glory be
to public plazas,
where pigeons, those great
winged performers, swoop and dive
for crumbs and the mere smile of a woman,
her hat made of roses, who stretches out her arms
in glee. Welcome, misunderstood and often-maligned
black-and-white wonder, who lands on open palms, dares
to tarry in public with us, who stand on the outskirts
of performance and art, snapping our photos,
then, habitually, darting to the next
pigeon-stained statue
on the tour.
Image © Europeana
Poetry Moment host for WPSU-FM, assistant editor of Presence, and Professor Emerita of English at Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published seventeen collections of poetry—including Seeing Things (Wildhouse 2025) and Hover Here (Broadstone 2026), as well as the ekphrastic collaborations Small Earthly Space (Shanti Arts, 2025), with photographer Karen Elias, and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind (Shanti Arts 2023), with her artist daughter Anna Lee Hafer (www.hafer.work) and others. Maddox also has published a story collection, five children’s books, and the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (2005) and Keystone Poetry (co-editor w/Jerry Wemple, PSU Press 2025). She is the great-grandniece of Branch Rickey, the General Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson to Major League Baseball. Her middle-grade biography is A Man Named Branch: The True Story of Baseball’s Great Experiment (Sunbury Press).