The Myth of Water
We need poetry now, more than ever.
The Myth of Water is a cycle of thirty-four poems by award-winning Alabama poet and writer Jeanie Thompson in the voice of world-renowned Alabamian Helen Keller. In their sweep, the poems trace Keller’s metamorphosis from a native of a bucolic Alabama town to her emergence as a beloved, international figure who championed the rights of the deaf-blind worldwide.
Thompson’s artfully concatenated vignettes form a mosaic that maps the insightful mind behind the elegant and enigmatic persona Keller projected. Thompson takes readers on the journey of Keller’s life, from some of the thirty-seven countries she visited, including the British Isles, Europe, and Japan to the wellsprings of her emotional awakening and insight. The poems are paired with fascinating biographical anecdotes from Keller’s life and samplings from her writing, which infuse the work with richly-rewarding biographical detail.
"These aren’t poems that clamor to the other senses, such as touch and smell, to fill the void of sight and sound (though they do effectively engage those other senses). Rather, they find in thought, language, and human connection a nearly material experience."
—NewPages.com
““You are so accustomed to light, I fear you will stumble when I try
To guide you through the land of darkness and silence.”
- Helen Keller, from The World I Live In
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Jeanie Thompson is the author of The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller, The Seasons Bear Us, White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems, Witness, Litany for a Vanishing Landscape, How to Enter the River, and Lotus and Psalm. Her poems have been published widely in journals and anthologies for many years, including in Whatever Remembers Us, High Horse, Working the Dirt, The Best of Crazyhorse, and recently The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume X: Alabama from Texas Review Press.
Helen Keller reading
Today, poets are exploring how to engage readers with history by entering the lives of characters. This increasingly a well-regarded genre is called historical persona poetry. When former Kentucky Poet Laureate Frank X. Walker visited Montgomery, Alabama, he met with students in George W. Carver High School’s library. “There ought to be a section in every library,” Walker said, “labeled historical persona poetry.” Like Shakespeare's soliloquies and Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, historical persona poems reveal character, motivation, and the human soul through intimate speech – sometimes addressed to an auditor and sometimes in a moment of self-reflection.
Jeanie was the founding editor of Black Warrior Review literary journal at the University of Alabama during her graduate schools days in the 1970s. She recently retired as the founding Executive Director of the Alabama Writers’ Forum, a statewide literary arts service organization. Her awards include two literary fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and a fellowship from the Louisiana Arts and Humanities Council. In 2003, Jeanie was awarded the Alumni Artist Award from the University of Alabama’s College of Arts and Sciences.
This spring Jeanie will be honored with the Albert B. Head Legacy Award that recognizes public officials, arts patrons, or arts educators who have empowered arts to thrive in their community, creating lasting importance for future generations in Alabama and beyond.