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***This is the thirteenth in a never-ending series called BACKSTORY
OF THE POEM where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one
specific poem and how the poet wrote that specific poem. All BACKSTORY OF THE POEM series links are posted at the end of this piece.
Backstory of the Poem
“Holiday on ICE”
by Jan Steckel
by Jan Steckel
http://www.jansteckel.com
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? I have
several Latino neighbors with small children, and one of them was the model for
the child in this poem. The child and I were talking about the English and
Spanish words for something, and then she told me the word in Mam. I asked her
what Mam was. She said it was a language. I asked who spoke the language, and
she said her mother and father and two brothers and she did. So I looked it up,
and found that it was a Mayan language spoken in Chiapas and in Guatemala. One
of the child's parents is from Mexico and the other from Guatemala, so that
made sense. (Photo Right attributed to Christal Ann Rice Cooper)
I also have signed up for a lot of alerts from immigrants' rights
groups so that I can show up for demonstrations, etc. One of them gives me text
alerts on my phone warning about immigration checkpoints.
My neighbors put a chili plant in front of their door when they
moved in. The Fruitvale, the Latino neighborhood of Oakland adjacent to my own
neighborhood, has a shop with tin ornaments. And one of the Latino families on
my street gave me a bucket of tamales near Christmas that were delicious. (Right Day of the Dead Parade in Fruitvale)
I keep a list of ideas for poems, and the penultimate stanza about
the sun hitting the fence and turning the clothesline pole into a sundial came
from that list. That and the fat squirrel and all the acorns is what I see when
I sit in my back yard every morning drinking coffee and petting our cat. We
have two California live oaks back there. That was the prompt that started the
poem off for me on the day that I wrote it. (Left Photo attributed to Jan Steckel's of her backyard with the two California live oaks)
Where were you when you
started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great
detail.
I was at the apartment of my friend and poetry mentor Julia Vinograd
when I wrote this poem. It was near Christmas, and all these elements came
together to make this Christmas poem. Julia's disabled and gets HUD housing, an
old studio apartment with a galley kitchen and a walk-in closet that leads to
the bathroom. Julia has a horror vacui, a fear of emptiness, and every bit of
space on her walls is covered with art or memorabilia. Even the windows are
decorated with stained glass pieces. She's particularly into skeletons, skulls,
masks, gargoyles, Bosch, the pre-Raphaelites, colored glass globes, and rubber
rats and snakes. The place is a giant incubator for the imagination. (Upper Right - Photo of Julia
What month and year did
you start writing this poem? December 2017
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?) Just a couple of drafts.
Sorry, I don't have the old ones. I just correct the document on my computer.
I am trying to find what
a chili tree looks like? Or what the scientific name of a chili tree is? I was wrong! it's not really a
tree, but more like a bush. So I changed the word "tree" to
"plant" in the latest version below.
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? Well, the
chili plant (Right) was a tree, which is wrong, as you tactfully pointed out, so now
it's a plant.
What do you want readers
of this poem to take from this poem? I want them
to see through the small girl's eyes, the warmth of her family, and see the
threat to her family posed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). (Left - Photo of Small Girl's Eyes attributed to Jan Steckel)
Which part of the poem
was the most emotional of you to write and why? Probably the stanza about immigration
checkpoints. I get very agitated about my friends and neighbors getting
arrested or thrown out of the country. (Right Photo attributed to Border Community Action)
Have you been to
Guatamala and/ or Chiapas, Mexico and can you give me two specific memories –
one per place – that influenced you in the writing of this poem? No, I've never been to either place,
though I've been to Guadalara in Mexico and to a fishing village in the Mexican
state of Sonora called Guaymas, as well as to Tijuana. (Left An outdoor market in Chichicastenango Guatemala in 2009)
Holiday on ICE
Cat
chitters at mockingbird.
Aerial
German Shepherd
atop
the car on blocks barks.
A
black-haired child waves
from
the studio apartment
where
she lives with her Mami,
Papi,
and teenage brothers.
Tin
ornaments adorn the chili
tree
outside her door. Black
Virgin
holds her holy infant.
Angels
sing Spanish and Mam.
It’s
cold in the North. Chili
chocolate
will warm her up.
Oakland’s
far from the village.
Mami
tells Papi there’s a text
on
the cell phone warning
immigration
checkpoint nearby.
Sun
hits the fence-top, makes
a
sundial of the clothesline pole.
Acorns
litter the lawn, squirrel
fat
and can’t bury them all.
Everyone
has to stay inside.
Family
all together. Tamales
at
Christmas. Baby Jesus smiles.
Note: Mam is a Mayan
language spoken by indigenous people in Guatemala and in Chiapas, Mexico.
Jan Steckel is a
former pediatrician who stopped practicing medicine because of chronic pain.
Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012
Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude
Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist
Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in
Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and
elsewhere. Her work was nominated three times each for the Pushcart and
Sundress Best of the Net anthologies, won the Goodreads Poetry Contest twice,
and won various other awards. She lives in Oakland, California. (Left Jan Steckel in January of 2018)
Amazon - The
Horizontal Poet
Robert A Fischer’s web
page
Jan Steckel’s Email
jmsteckel@aol.com,
Jan Steckel’s Web Page
http://www.jansteckel.com
Julia Vinograd’s
Biography Page
Zeitgeist Press - The
Horizontal Poet and The Underwater
Hospital
BACKSTORY OF THE POEM BIBLIOGRAPHY LINKS
001 December 29, 2017
Margo
Berdeshevksy’s “12-24”
002 January 08, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “82 Miles From the Beach, We Order The Lobster At Clear Lake
Café”
003 January 12, 2018
Barbara
Crooker’s “Orange”
004 January 22, 2018
Sonia
Saikaley’s “Modern Matsushima”
005 January 29, 2018
Ellen
Foos’s “Side Yard”
006 February 03, 2018
Susan
Sundwall’s “The Ringmaster”
007 February 09, 2018
Leslea
Newman’s “That Night”
008 February 17, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher “June Fairchild Isn’t Dead”
009 February 24, 2018
Charles
Clifford Brooks III “The Gift of the Year With Granny”
010 March 03, 2018
Scott
Thomas Outlar’s “The Natural Reflection of Your Palms”
011 March 10, 2018
Anya
Francesca Jenkins’s “After Diane Beatty’s Photograph “History Abandoned”
012 March 17, 2018
Angela
Narciso Torres’s “What I Learned This Week”
013 March 24, 2018
Jan
Steckel’s “Holiday On ICE”
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/03/13-backstory-of-poem-jan-steckels.html
014 March 31, 2018
Ibrahim
Honjo’s “Colors”
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/03/14-backstory-of-poem-ibrahim-honjos.html
015 April 14, 2018
Marilyn
Kallett’s “Ode to Disappointment”
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/04/15-backstory-of-poem-ode-to_14.html
016 April 27, 2018
Beth
Copeland’s “Reliquary”
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/04/16-backstory-of-poem-reliquary-by-beth.html
017 May 12, 2018
Marlon
L Fick’s “The Swallows of Barcelona”
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/05/17-backstory-of-poem-swallows-of.html
018 May 25, 2018
Juliet
Cook’s “ARTERIAL DISCOMBOBULATION”
019 June 09, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “Stiletto Killer. . . A Surmise”
020 June 16, 2018
Charles
Rammelkamp’s “At Last I Can Start Suffering”
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/06/20-backstory-of-poem-at-least-i-can.html
021 July 05, 2018
Marla
Shaw O’Neill’s “Wind Chimes”
022 July 13, 2018
Julia Gordon-Bramer’s
“Studying Ariel”
023 July 20, 2018
Bill Yarrow’s “Jesus
Zombie”
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/07/23-backstory-of-poem-jesus-zombie-by.html
024 July 27, 2018
Telaina Eriksen’s “Brag
2016”
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/07/24-backstory-of-poem-brag-2016-by.html
025 August 01, 2018
Seth Berg’s (It is only
Yourself that Bends – so Wake up!”
https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2018/08/25-backstory-of-poem-it-is-only.html
026 August 07, 2018
David Herrle’s “Devil In
the Details”
