A Necessary Retargeting
In my last posting, the last in the series about a visit I made to a Minuteman III Launch Control Center, I told how one of the missileers on alert in the LCC handed me a poem that had come in on facility’s printer from another LCC. I inferred that the poem had been written by a missileer in the other facility and sent to our Launch Control Center because of the news that an English professor was in the house.
In this entry, I did some analysis of it and made some suggestions about what I took to be a work in progress.
Shortly after my entry posted, a friend who is former colleague and a formidable philologist let me know that the poem I had been handed had been published before— for the first time, as far as he could tell, in April 1981, appearing on the back cover of the magazine of the Strategic Air Command called Combat Crew. The poet’s name was Captain Robert A. Wyckoff.
The version of the poem I was handed in the LCC was truncated but what it did contain was verbatim from Captain Wyckoff’s poem. It might have been written from memory by whoever sent it.
I have since discovered that for a while after its publication, and maybe even today, missileers were given copies of the poem when they pulled their first alerts. And that Robert Wyckoff, who spent twenty years in the Air Force, is now considered the “ICBM poet laureate.”
It was no draft. More like holy writ. “A psalm,” my former colleague said. Which seems right. He reckoned that people doing the job missileers are assigned to do could use such a credo.
I’m glad I didn’t know this. I wouldn’t have presumed to make editorial suggestions. It would have been rude, for one thing. A waste of time, for another.
I do hold with the claim attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that “Art is never finished, merely abandoned.” Not so with what is taken to be holy writ--something taken to be given, rather than as something made.
Having made the comments about what I took to be a work in progress, I stand by them.
Back to my own work in progress.