Charles Rammelkamp
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.
Badge or Bridge?
I wasn’t sure if we were talking about Ichabod Crane
or Stephen Crane, hoping I wouldn’t be asked my opinion,
but it turned out it was Hart Crane,
and somehow I felt on top of the discussion,
remembering the Rip Van Winkle section of The Bridge,
a tale originally told by Washington Irving,
who also wrote “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,”
which couldn’t just be a coincidence.
Nothing about The Red Badge of Courage, the Civil War.
Stephen Crane, dead at 28, tuberculosis, Black Forest, Germany;
Hart Crane, dead at 32, suicide, Gulf of Mexico;
Ichabod – “without glory” in Hebrew – disappeared
after his encounter with the headless horseman.
So when the professor inevitably called on me in class,
I started blathering about Pocahontas,
Crane’s symbol of the American continent,
the American land, “Powhatan’s Daughter,”
across the “Van Winkle,” “River” and “Indiana” sections
of The Bridge, Nature giving way to exploitation,
the rape of the land. Pocahontas a Virgin Mary figure,
then casually mentioned Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring,
the title taken from “The Dance” section of Crane’s poem.
Finally the bell rang, class over,
nobody sure if I was an idiot or onto something,
but after class Becky Douglas asked me
if we could study together in the library.
Score!
