Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? About a quarter of a century ago (in 1999 or 2000), I was teaching a creative writing class at Essex Community College in Baltimore County. In a nearby neighborhood that spring, a jealous man held his girlfriend hostage over some domestic issue. I think she was dumping him. The police were called. There was a standoff for several days. It was a fairly prominent local new story. Eventually, the firemen from the department scaled the house and the man surrendered, as I recall.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bal-pal09-story.html%3foutputType=amp
The story was part of the pre-class chit-chat among the students, and, inspired, I suggested to the class that we all take roles in a drama in which a madman takes a classroom hostage, writing persona poems from the madman’s perspective, various class members, etc. I won’t say it was an enormously successful project, but we did perform the whole cycle for another classroom, and they appreciated it (the class met at night when the campus was basically deserted, which added to the atmosphere).
https://www.ccbcmd.edu/About-CCBC/Locations/CCBC-Essex.aspx
After the semester ended, I went back to the project and wrote several other poems, one from a janitor’s point-of-view, one by a student in the classroom, etc.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. The poem began in my head, of course, and then phrases and ideas jotted in a notebook. Then I transferred the ideas, with some revisions-on-the-fly into a computer file at home. At that time we had two school-age children in the house, and we all needed the computer at one time or another, so this was always a factor to be considered. (Below: Charles Rammelkamp in his writing space. Copyright by Charles Rammelkamp)
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) It’s tough to say how many drafts or what constitutes a “draft.” Over the years I took the poem out and tinkered with it from time to time. Not sure if this constitutes a “draft” or not. I submitted individual poems from this sequence from time to time, but the poem was only taken by Orbis, a UK journal, in 2021! Then, the editor, Carole Baldock, suggested several edits, mainly changes in line breaks, some of which I agreed with though not all. For instance, lines 8 and 9 of the version I submitted read, “like astronauts in outer space, / drifting away from the space station.” Her suggestion was to get rid of “like” and to move “drifting” up from line 9 to line 8, as in the finished poem. Moreover, the editor suggested italicizing the word “do” in the first line of the fourth stanza, for emphasis.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? I’m sure there were, but I don’t have the evidence! Better question might be, are there any lines in the original drafts that are in the final version!
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? This is a poem about priorities, and maybe that quaint concept of “pride.” Cassiopeia is punished rather harshly by those fickle Greek gods. Is the satisfaction she takes in her beauty any more reprehensible than the Nereids’ jealousy? What had she done to them that they hadn’t actually done to themselves, after all? But that’s the classical concept of “ethics” for you. But it’s the professor’s “pride” that’s really at stake here. Not that he could take out an unbalanced guy with a gun, certainly had no training or preparation for a situation like this, but all he seems to really care about is his syllabus! Not the safety and well-being of the students in his class. Still, maybe this is something anybody can relate to, how one is personally affected.
Also, I’ve always been baffled by some of the constellations in the sky, the stories that underpin them. How did those come about? Pegasus, for instance, or Orion.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? Obviously, I identified with the Astronomy professor, even though my subject was Writing: being the guy in the spotlight, in a sense. Of course, the central figure has to be the madman, and all bets are basically off in a situation like that, but I felt his confusion!
Has this poem been published before? And if so where? This poem was just published in the UK poetry journal, Orbis It spent many years in the proverbial desk drawer, aka, computer file, but I thought to submit it to Orbis. Glad I did!
The Astronomy Professor’s Hubris
The crazy thing was,
when the madman broke into the room,
guns waving around like lightning rods,
taking the class hostage,
as in a scene from Dog Day Afternoon,
all I kept thinking
was we were falling behind in the syllabus,
astronauts in outer space drifting
away from the space station,
our hands reaching out to hold something,
but coming up empty,
grabbing at nothing, stability elusive
as page numbers next to calendar dates.
We were supposed to begin discussing
the constellations: Cassiopeia,
chained up in the sky
because she’d been so boastful
about her beauty.
Poseidon made her that funny five-star zig-zag,
to placate the Nereids.
How do you make something poetic
out of a random assemblage of stars;
derive a shape to fit a story
about the consequences of pride?
I try to do it with my curriculum,
knowledge shaped
in a grand connect-the-dots pattern.
Scattered all to hell now
by this lunatic
straight out of some tragic mythology.
Orbis Journal
Carole Baldock Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/carole.baldock.9
Orbis Journal Spring 2021 issue
http://www.orbisjournal.com/2021/04/orbis195/
All Backstory of the Poem LIVE LINKS can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html
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