Apr 11, 2008  |  By: AMY CAVANAUGH  | COMMENTS     

For Kathi Wolfe, a local poet, freelance journalist and contributor to the Washington Blade, her recently published chapbook, “Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems,” is the next step on what has been a life-long relationship with the famed deaf and blind activist. Wolfe, a lesbian who has been legally blind since birth, wrote the poems in the book after her initial impressions of Keller began to change.

“I’ve been thinking about Helen Keller for a long time,” Wolfe says, “Like many folks who are blind or visually impaired, I grew up under the shadow of Helen … I didn’t want anything to do with her since it was the era of ‘The Miracle Worker,’ and she was presented as having tantrums by the water pump. On the other hand, she lived to be 87 and was mentally alert until late in her life, so the other image of her is as a saintly old lady. I wanted people to see me as a regular person, not as a helpless, childlike animal or a saintly, heroic person who probably never had sex.”

Wolfe’s opinion of Keller changed in graduate school, when she learned that Keller was a socialist, an early feminist, an opponent of racism

and a vaudeville performer. It’s this multi-faceted Keller who appears in Wolfe’s poems, and the woman Wolfe calls “Helen” (“I worked with her as a character, and she’s like an alter ego,” Wolfe says) comes across as intelligent and irreverent, as in “Fingertips and Cigarettes: Helen at the Café:” “I never wanted to be a hero. / The heat from the gaze / of strangers almost burns my hands.  / 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.”

“HELEN TAKES THE STAGE” is Wolfe’s first chapbook, though she has published work in poetry journals like the “Beltway Poetry Quarterly” and the “Potomac Review.” Wolfe, who lives in Falls Church, Va., worked on the book over a period of three and a half years, in which she researched Keller’s life, wrote poems, read them at poetry readings and had friends edit them.

Wolfe is currently working on poems about a new character, Uppity Blindgirl. 

“She’s a contemporary person who is blind, but she’s not me,” Wolfe says, “She’s around 25 to 30, likes to go to clubs and dance, wears red stilettos, and blows smoke rings … I may go back to write more about Helen, but she and I need a bit of a rest from each other.”

Wolfe began writing poetry regularly to assuage her grief after the death of her partner, Anne, in 2001, but she has been writing since she was very young.

“If I couldn’t write poetry, it would feel as if I couldn’t breathe,” she says, “It would be impossible for me not to write it. … Poetry allows you to engage in wordplay, and you can express irony, comedy, tragedy, emotion and detachment in a short poem. Poetry comes out of one’s inner life, and it’s very concrete in that you’re observing things and being precise.”

The last poem in the book, “Dancing with Martha Graham,” is about a dance that Graham choreographed for a 74-year-old Keller: “Flying is only for the gods, I think, until / you hold me so close your sweat becomes mine … you twirl me like a pixilated top, and I fly, / quick as Teletype, smooth as a martini / on a summer night, beyond sound, / beyond light.”

It is in this poem, among others, that Wolfe achieves her goal for the chapbook.

“I wanted to break down the whitewashed stereotypical interpretation of Helen Keller and reveal her hidden history,” Wolfe says, “She was unique in many ways, but because she’s a famous person with a disability, that’s how people view her and it informs how they view all of those who have disabilities. I wrote these poems as a creative artist, not as a political activist, although I hope that if people read it, [it] might help break down different prejudices.”