Almost exactly ten years ago, I wrote about traveling back to my house after attending a reading in Decatur. It was a full moon, and I took the Upper River Road, a favorite rural drive through farmland just south of the Tennessee River. In the full moon afterglow of the reading, I noted the white intensity of the newly opened cotton in the fields and the freshness of a brief shower as I crossed the river that glowed in moonlight filtered through thin clouds. I had become more attuned to my senses – prompted in part by the poems I had just heard.
The reading was by poet Jeanie Thompson presenting poems from her newly released book, The Myth of Water, a contemplative meditation on the life of Helen Keller. The poet breaks through the silence of Keller, who was struck blind and deaf after a fever at an early age. Thompson explores what Helen Keller must have been thinking, feeling, and seeing in her heart and in her mind’s eye.
Keller, of course, with the patient guidance of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, was taught to navigate and communicate with the world around her. She earned a college degree and became a beloved icon of strength, grace, advocacy. Her remarkable success and leadership inspired world leaders and she is a beacon of unfettered possibility whose spirit and courage still speak to us today.
In 2016, poet Jeanie Thompson’s book, The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller, moved beyond the public image and explored the possibilities and inner life of Helen, the woman. I had first read the poems on the page, but listening to the poet’s steady, clear, unhurried voice bestowed added texture and meaning.
In 2025, Thompson went into the Opelika, Alabama, recording studio of Grammy-winning guitarist/engineer/producer Larry Mitchell and added a new vision and texture to her remarkable poems of senses denied and discovered. The result is The Myth of Water: Go into Your Life, a CD and booklet containing Thompson’s reading of eight of her poems with sense-enhancing underscoring by Mitchell (www.jeaniethompson.com; available in digital format at The Myth of Water: Go Into Your Life | Jeanie Thompson).
Five of the poems are from the thirty-seven poem cycle The Myth of Water with three additional selections from Thompson’s previous books, Litany for a Vanishing Landscape, How to Enter the River, and White for Harvest. Those three poems, written before the Helen poems, remind the reader just how skillfully Thompson’s poems have always evoked the senses and the natural world. “Snapshot in the Red Fields,” from White for Harvest, provides a sensory depth that is thrilling and visceral as a farmer, surveying his newly plowed field, “would just as soon dive into it, and forget himself, / down into its depths, rather than to ever know / that season would not come again.” “The Lyrical Trees,” from Litany for a Vanishing Landscape, vividly paints a cold winter landscape as Mitchell’s chords emphasize the visual references and three trees rise “in twists that dancers dream to imitate.” Mitchell’s mesmeric percussive beat takes you into “How to Enter the River,” one of Thompson’s signature early poems, as the reader and the person paddling the boat become one with the nature that surrounds them.
It is in the Helen poems that the full triumph of the collaboration of words and music is felt. The first poem, “Dark Dancer,” addresses Helen’s great love, Peter Fagan, the man who “shook language / in my face and asked me to dance syntax / with you.” It is a poignant rendering of the occasion on which Fagan fails to arrive at Helen’s sister’s house for their planned elopement. Helen, alone on the porch, feels the morning arrive in “a rumble from the street / signaling day.” That sense of loss also finds voice in “The Little Boy Next Door,” inspired by the photograph of Helen with a young boy nestled in her arms. She “felt the quickening of a mother’s desire for his / small body on hers” and later, when Peter did not arrive, she “mourned the child lost / to me.”
In “River, Bridge, and Sky,” Helen is on a ship with Polly, her companion after “Teacher,” Anne Sullivan, has died. Helen and Polly each silently remember this day is the birthday of Teacher as Helen ponders the world that Teacher opened for her – as she “Begged me / to enter a land you / promised I would see.” Later, “Wave Memory” considers the moment at Ivy Green, Helen’s family home, when Helen, “just a babe,” experiences “the receding sound of Mother’s / breath at the phantom’s ear.” “No mooring, no anchor” is the plaintive refrain.
There is a moment in “River, Bridge, and Sky” when Helen acknowledges the whispers of some that “‘She who doesn’t know light, / much less a flower, writes this?’.” Many don’t realize that Helen Keller had sight and vision for the first nineteen months of her life; she later described vague, uncertain images as if from a dream (she even used the word “nightmare”). Even so, in these poems I am struck by Thompson’s ability to evoke the senses of touch, smell, and taste that Helen retained to capture the reality of her world.
There is triumph and resolve in “The Myth of W-A-T-E-R,” the final piece in this collection. In it, Helen clarifies the moment of finding language with Teacher at the pump and acknowledges the myth: “You may have your play, your frozen moment in time / if these please you.” In “The Myth of W-A-T-E-R,” Helen takes charge of her story and follows the command to “Go into your life!”
The Helen poems have a wistful longing, calm acceptance and resolve. Jeanie Thompson’s vocal performance has always served her words well and, with this collaboration, Larry Mitchell’s masterful guitar work, moody percussion, and evocative keyboard work have added new meaning and texture. Listen to the subtle shifts in tempo, the moments that words and music call forth excitement, anticipation, or loss. These are poems I have visited often over the years, but the addition of Mitchell’s music lends a different way to understand Thompson’s words and intent. Thompson and Mitchell have made some live appearances to perform their work on The Myth of Water. I hear there are more to come. Be watchful for those. I hope to experience these poems in a live setting soon.
