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***This is
the thirty-eighth 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 links are at the end of this
piece.
#38
Backstory of the Poem
“Women of the Fields” by Andrena Zawinski
“Women of the Fields” by Andrena Zawinski
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? Where were you when
you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great
detail. My spouse
and I were driving down to Monterey after visiting her mother in the Central
Valley of California. En route, we passed through Watsonville and Salinas,
where, like in the San Joaquin, you can’t miss seeing workers in droves pick
fruits and vegetables from fields skirting the highways. After stopping at a
roadside stands for fresh berries, we made our way through Santa Cruz, a
contrast as a college town scene with beaches.
(Below: Women of in the fields of Watsonville. Credit : United States Department of Agriculture)
It was
then a radio show came on promoting a documentary that addressed issues facing
women who worked in the fields. This piqued my interest since I had already
written and published poetry on field workers: “The Pickers” (published in The
Progressive and elsewhere), “Intoxicating Morning” (published in Ale House Review),
“On the Road Hijacked by Memory” (that most recently appeared in Aeolian Harp
Series: anthology of poetry folios Vol. 3 from Glass Lyre Press). (Above Right: famous migrant women photo attributed to Dorothea Lane. Public Domain)
Around that time, I had
been giving some thought to agricultural exemptions that allowed children to
work the fields along with quite a bit of thought to horrific work conditions
for men, but I hadn’t yet turned my attention to women being part of that labor
force. In the car, I started jotting down notes of images I had seen, random
thoughts that flooded my head, things to later look into, when the radio show
turned to sexual assault as something women had to contend with almost
routinely. (Above Right: Woman migrant worker in Salinas, California. Public Domain)
Later I was haunted by this, spent days reading about these women.
Then the combination of that rather haphazard research meshed with characters
who began to loom large in my imagination and spilled as a catalog onto the
page; almost like real essences, as I fine tuned them, draft upon draft, they
became very close to the heart for me. https://www.amazon.com/Frontline-Rape-Fields/dp/B00DCRE6GM/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1541823591&sr=8-2&keywords=%22Rape+In+the+Fields%22+documentary
The poem at first was no
more than a hodgepodge of notes, often my own handwriting indecipherable in its
rushes, yet finally the poem took shape into its form. After finishing the
piece, I dedicated it to Dolores Huerta (http://doloreshuerta.org/dolores-huerta/),
cofounder (with Cesar Chavez) of United Farmworkers (https://ufw.org/),
who after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the Obama White House,
said not enough was done in the Civil Rights Movement for women, declaring
herself in her 80’s a born-again-feminist.
What
month and year did you start writing this poem?
I started the poem sometime in the summer of 2014 and finished
it a month or so later after many interruptions and drafts. An incessant
revisionist, I never keep old drafts because they remind me of the mess writing
can sometimes be in its false starts, throat clearing, its stumbling around
before getting up on strong legs. (Right: Andrena Zawinski in 2014. Copyright permission grated by Andrena Zawinski for this CRC Blog Post Only) 
What do
you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I hope readers will recognize
women who are not part of the Me Too
movement, women who cannot risk raising their voices, women who all too often
are taken for granted, the invisible women who do the work others will not. (Left: Andrena Zawinski giving a poetry reading in January of 2018. Copyright permission granted by Andrena Zawinski for this CRC Blog Post Only)
This is especially important to me as a granddaughter of immigrants who were
relegated to the dirtiest work in steel mills and coal mines, as a woman whose
own father in an inheritance of those dirty jobs (and more often laid off than
not) got lost in pills and alcohol, as a woman whose own mother worked night
shifts on assembly lines, cleaned houses, took care of other people’s children.
These women of the fields voices are ones I wish to have heard just as I raise
those from my own working poor roots. (Above Right: California vineyard attributed to and copyright permission granted by Andrena Zawinski for this CRC Blog Post Only)
An earlier version of this
poem appeared in Thomas Merton Center’s The New People: Pittsburgh’s Peace and
Justice Newspaper (2014) and then in the San Francisco Revolutionary Poets
Brigade anthology Overthrowing Capitalism: Beyond Endless War, Racist Police,
and Sexist Elites (2015). It also appears in Borderlands and Crossroads:Writing
the Motherland anthology (2016) and most recently in my book, LANDINGS from
Kelsay Books (2017).
Women of the Fields
—for Dolores Huerta
The
women of the fields clip red bunches of grapes
in
patches off neatly tilled farmland in the San Joaquin,
clip
sweet globes they an no longer stand to taste.
Just
twenty miles shy of Santa Cruz beach babies in thongs,
Pleasure
Beach surfers on longboards, all the cool convertibles
speeding
Cabrillo Highway, women line as pickers—
back
bent over another summer’s harvest.
The
campesinas labor without shade tents or water buffalos,
shrouded
in oversized shirts and baggie work pants, disguised
as
what they are not, faces masked in bandanas under cowboy hats
in
fils de calzón:
The young one named Ester taken in the
onion patch
with the field boss’ gardening shears
at her throat.
The older one called Felicia isolated
in the almond orchard
and pushed down into a doghouse. The
pretty one, Linda,
without work papers, asked to bear a
son in trade
for a room and job in the pumpkin
patch, Isabel, ravaged
napping under a tree at the end of a
dream after a long
day picking pomegranates, violación de
un sueño
Salomé on the apple ranch forced up
against the fence
as the boss bellowed ¡Dios mío! to her
every no, no, no.
The
promotoras flex muscle in words, steal off into night
face-to-face
to talk health care, pesticides, heatstroke, rape,
meet
tally accounts—forced to exchange panties for paychecks
in
orchards, on ranches, in fields, in truck beds—to speak out
to
risk joblessness or deportation to an old country, a foreign soil.
Women
of the fields, like those before them, like those
who
will trail after—las Chinas, Japonesas, Filipinas—
to
slave for frozen food empires in pesticide drift,
residue
crawling along skin, creeping into nostrils
and
pregnancies it ends as they hide from La Migra
in
vines soaked in toxins or crawl through sewer tunnels,
across
railroad tracks, through fences to pick our sweet berries,
for
this, this: la fruta del diablo.
BACKSTORY OF THE POEM
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”
014 March 31, 2018
Ibrahim
Honjo’s “Colors”
015 April 14, 2018
Marilyn
Kallett’s “Ode to Disappointment”
016 April 27, 2018
Beth
Copeland’s “Reliquary”
017 May 12, 2018
Marlon
L Fick’s “The Swallows of Barcelona”
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”
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”
024 July 27, 2018
Telaina Eriksen’s “Brag
2016”
025 August 01, 2018
Seth Berg’s “It is only
Yourself that Bends – so Wake up!”
026 August 07, 2018
David Herrle’s “Devil In
the Details”
027 August 13, 2018
Gloria Mindock’s “Carmen
Polo, Lady Necklaces, 2017”
028 August 21, 2018
Connie Post’s “Two
Deaths”
029 August 30, 2018
Mary Harwell Sayler’s
“Faces in a Crowd”
030 September 16, 2018
Larry Jaffe’s “The
Risking Point”
031 September 24,
2018
Mark Lee Webb’s “After
We Drove”
032 October 04, 2018
Melissa Studdard’s
“Astral”
033 October 13, 2018
Robert Craven’s “I Have
A Bass Guitar Called Vanessa”
034 October 17, 2018
David Sullivan’s “Paper
Mache Peaches of Heaven”
035 October 23, 2018
Timothy Gager’s
“Sobriety”
036 October 30, 2018
Gary Glauber’s “The
Second Breakfast”
037 November 04, 2018
Heather Forbes-McKeon’s
“Melania’s Deaf Tone Jacket”
038 November 11, 2018
Andrena Zawinski’s “Women
of the Fields”
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