We continue this week in NPM with another frequent contributor, Charles Rammelkamp. This collection of Charles’ poems will take you on a narrative journey through the eyes of an interesting and very notable character. Cab Driver Of all the people to almost run over! Anybody else, I’d have shrugged an apology, been on my way back home to Baltimore. I’d come to the intersection of H Street and Jackson Place, maybe took the corner too sharp, veering in toward the curb, but I didn’t hit him, didn’t even come close to running Coolidge over! But then the secret service guy, a different one from the one who grabbed Cal’s arm, jumped onto my running board, startled the hell out of me. “Who are you?” I demanded. “A secret service agent.” He called over to a street cop, had me arrested, charged me with cutting corners, failing to give the right…
“Peter Roget,” Poems by Charles Rammelkamp
Little Red Man My minister father composed sermons. My uncle praised their “taste and elegance”: a word man long before me. Son of a Geneva clockmaker, mon pere, Jean Roget – “little red man,” from the French rouge – immigrated to London at 24 to become pastor at Le Quarré, the French Protestant church in Soho. Papa preached in the little Huguenot church on Little Dean Street, a few blocks north of St. James’s, the colossus near Piccadilly Circus, Christopher Wren’s largest church – where I was christened in 1779. Papa’d married Catherine Romilly a year before, in St. Marleybone Church, welcomed into their family without reservation. My uncle, Samuel, rhapsodized about our happiness, “as complete as is ever the portion of human beings,” but only months after my birth, Papa was “seized with an…
“Frank Olson” — The Poetry of Charles Rammelkamp
Frank Olson “Webber,” my editor barked when I walked into the office that day just after Thanksgiving, 1953. “I want you to look into this story about the CIA guy who jumped out of the tenth floor window at the Statler, on Seventh Avenue. Why did he do it? Could he have been he pushed?” My beat? CIA, MK-ULTRA, “mind-control” drugs. Brainwashing. I knew about Frank Olson already; worked at Camp Dietrich in Maryland, Special Ops, an aerosol expert, his specialty “airborne distribution of biological germs.” Worked on Operation Sea Spray a couple year earlier, where they released a dust that floated like anthrax, near San Francisco. At Dietrich, he directed experiments that involved gassing and poisoning lab animals. “I’ll look right into it, sir,” already booking a flight and hotel in my mind, thinking,…