A few months ago, I wrote about Kathi Wolfe's pending chapbook, "Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems." The chapbook is now available for $10 from Pudding House Press in Columbus, Ohio, and I assure you your $10 will be well spent indeed if you buy it. These poems achieve the very highest goals of historical/biographical poetry--to project themselves into the inner life and world of the subject with total believability, and to do so using language that is both precise and beautiful. Wolfe's Keller is not the plaster saint of sentimental legend, but flawed, at times irascible, and always scintillating. Wolfe begins her collection with "Q&A: Palace Theater," a marvelous found poem that features Keller's own words from her appearances in vaudeville:
What is the greatest obstacle to world peace?
The human race.
What is the slowest thing in the world?
Congress.
Do you think women are men's intellectual equals?
God made woman foolish
so that she might be a suitable companion to man.
Do you desire your sight more than anything else in the world?
No! I would rather walk with a friend in the dark
than walk alone in the light.
From this statement of original principles, Wolfe creates a flesh-and-blood Keller who disarms us with her brilliance, wit, insight, and romantic intensity. "They call me wonder woman, then say/they'd rather be dead than live like me./I'd like to blow smoke rings around/their pity," Keller says in "Fingertips and Cigarettes: Helen at the Cafe." In "Dreaming of Heaven," Keller defends her perceptions of the world: "What right/do I have to even talk/of color, you demand.//No more right/than you/to tell of Paris,/unless, like me,/you've inhaled/the mingled scent/of cigarettes and hyacinths/along the Seine." Yet Keller by no means is always on the defensive; there are poems of great tenderness, such as "Brush Strokes: Helen Greets a Friend": "Your mustache/dances with my fingers,/tickles their tips. Your skin, rough,/misshapen as a skewed moon crater,/smells like sun-drenched lavender." In "A Letter to my Hands," Keller says of them, "You exhale the dots of Braille," and concludes, "You'd go on strike/if I were the factory boss/and you the union./Who knows/why you stick with me?/I only know,/apart from you,/I couldn't even breathe."
As a journalist, Wolfe writes often about differently abled persons and disability issues; in "Helen Takes the Stage," she has raised advocacy for the differently abled to art--much as Helen Keller herself did. This is a deeply humane, moving and funny book, and you can buy a copy from www.puddinghouse.com.