SHANNAN

Your poems grapple with universal ideas of capitalism, sex, addiction, and loss by – as we read in “Mania” – setting up the overarching image of “The Mall of America” both as a literal and a metaphorical place. The “bear” lurks throughout the poem, menacing and yet an odd source of comfort, desire. A creature you wish both to approach and evade. You write of him as “luxurious” which I felt was a thrilling use of that identifier. Unexpected and yet so oddly fitting. One also cannot help but feel that the bear might be either a foil or representation of the father. A turning point within the piece mirrors the “bear's umber sheen” with the speaker’s hair color, suggesting a sense of ownership, inheritance, masking…. By the end of the piece, the speaker appears to have come full circle, internalizing the “something alive”, and now – with the mention of “eyes” – looking back out at the world. This gaze does not feel settling, but is still full of boldness. How do you juggle these apparently dichotomous feelings? I’d love to hear more about the way you have carried these feelings throughout this particular poem as well, especially in connection with its title.

HALEE

These poems are from a yet-to-be-published manuscript exploring retail labor, manufactured environments, insects, and extraction. It’s a departure from my first (also yet-to-be-published) manuscript, which centers memory and biography in a classic sense. This second manuscript still is personal, but less so. I think it’s interesting to reconceptualize retail and mall spaces as places that are simultaneously intimate and isolating.

AAAASome of these poems represent the more personal aspects of this book, including this poem, which came out of revising a different poem about the aquarium beneath the Mall of America, and also that came out of my own Bipolar II diagnosis, which I finally sought out after learning, almost ten years after his death, my dad had been diagnosed with type I. It was something I always suspected, but a confirming diagnosis, for better or for worse, made it something tangible, something, like the bear, that I could touch. This is also a true story, one that I told to a therapist when we went through the details of my life to find these moments. Why did he insist we drive 200 miles to MOA just to pet fancy fur less than an hour before close? Now I know. Now I can look it in the stilled, marble eye. 

AAAATo contrast, bears are protectors in Ojibwe cosmologies. Not only physically against violence, but in that they know all the plants that are edible and/or medicinal. I wanted to bring this symbol of protection into the poem as a way to protect both that little self, and the self I live with now, against the chaos that my father brought to my life. I generally am suspicious of linking creativity with facets of mental illness, but I do think the experience of living with bipolar II allows me to hold multiple truths simultaneously, and the bear became a personal symbol of that.

KARAN

Thank you for sharing so openly, Halee. I understand what you mean about linking creativity and mental illness — pop-culture has corrupted us with romanticizing artists and geniuses who were struggling with mental illnesses. Could you explain more about holding multiple truths simultaneously. Fitzgerald, in his seminal essay, The Crack-up (one of my most favorite pieces of writing) while speaking of mental illness (addiction, depression, etc) writes: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Do you mean something along these lines? Are you also speaking about the movement between mania and depression and to know that both those are truths exist in the singular mind and body?

HALEE

The ability to function can be such a struggle, especially with a mind that can be in such a rush at one moment, and slow as molasses the next! Poetry is one way I know how to cope with struggles and challenges related to mental illness. For me, it goes beyond the sense of expressing the duality between mania and depression, and is more so felt in the spaces between mind and body. One of my primary symptoms includes the feeling of my mind moving faster than what my body and mouth can actually keep up with. It’s exhausting! But in a way, I think it may have helped me develop an intuitive sense of syncopated rhythm in the cadence of my poems. I’m not particularly skilled or attuned to iambs, trochees, and spondees unless I really focus in on them, but I do have an internal sense of rhythm when writing and revising. The duality of mind and body comes to define this process for me, and becomes a twisting skeletal structure upon which I can drape stories and images that occupy this sense of duality.

AAAAThe holding of multiple truths comes into different aspects of my life as well, as it does for all of us. I am the king of Bi-’s: Bipolar, Biracial, Bisexual, Bigender! I refuse the idea that those of us who live in Bi- spaces are halved, percentaged, or that we have to pick a side. At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge the power of occupying spaces of privilege—even when it’s conditional, compulsory, or closeting— leveraging them to fight for everyone’s liberation. I want to write poems where holding multiple truths and  realities can be electric sources of creativity.  

SHANNAN

I really love how you begin “I Didn’t Need to Read Communist Theory to Know.” There is such joy and humor in “sciatica sounds like the name of a philosopher / I haven’t read yet.” Yet what you’re speaking about is a really painful physical condition, one that I can unfortunately speak about from experience as being the kind of literal pain in the ass that won’t let you sit or lie down or walk without discomfort. What jumps out for me, then, immediately, is the linking of philosophy and pain. Or perhaps ideology and pain. How we can become steeped within certain worldviews that painfully chain us within our suffering. This is the understanding with which I step into the poem. And by introducing the “family” right off the bat, I now feel how hardwired such thinking can be. It’s interesting that your title refers to a political theory, because some people do suggest that we are most heavily influenced in our political context and leanings by our family, whether that’s affirmative or us running to the polar opposite ends. I’d love to hear how you navigate politics overall in your poetry and specific to that context you come from yourself – what do you wish were more eminent in the poetic imagination today?

HALEE

I’m interested in politics that understands how oppression lives and can be read in the body. I developed a workshop for people in the service industry in the summer of 2022, including people in the retail, food, custodial, and sex industries. Workers whose bodies undergo strain—and in some cases, pleasure—in order to serve a customer. This is a subset of the working class that is often overlooked in rhetoric about the working class, and I think it has something to do with gender.  A student said something that I’ll never forget, that they never thought to think of the leg, foot, and wrist pain they developed from working at Whole Foods as disabling. I will die on this hill—service work, in all its permutations, is disabling. You have to continually lift heavy boxes, stand in one place for hours at a time, undergo emotional distress from rude customers that gradually degrade your sense of worth over time. In short, service workers deserve better! I want to develop whatever space I can for this — theory doesn’t always reach the working class (though the working class can absolutely comprehend theory). The best way I personally know how to do it is through community building via body-based poetry. 

KARAN

This is a wonderful initiative, Halee. And it makes so much sense, what you’re saying about service work being disabling and often degrading. Would you tell us a little more — what do these workshops consist of? What kind of students do you usually get? From what kinds of service work? And what do you mean when you say body-based poetry? 

HALEE

I liked to begin with opening the space to just vent about work, compare horror stories, and observations. The worst day at work ever often has so much to do with clashes of economic class, gender, ability, race, etc., and I wanted to demonstrate that venting actually serves a political purpose. When we take the time to tease apart these experiences with folks who go through the same thing, we build working class solidarity, as well as affirmations that these interactions are not isolated to personal failings of our own, that they say much more about society than they do about our own self worth. My hope was that by dedicating time for “venting”, the students were “vented”, open to the flow of internal heat as they responded to exercises and readings.

AAAADeveloping a space where students could feel secure in being vented was one facet of developing a body-based pedagogy for this class. It also included practicing body scans, where we listened, questioned, and cared for the places that felt pain from this kind of work—harkening back to the politics of pain—as well as places of pleasure, holding multiple truths (there they are again!) in the body.

AAAAI also used grant money to pay the students a small stipend, and to buy them fun Decomposition notebooks, because writing supplies are not free, and certainly not cheap! We also had a cumulative reading at a hip venue in Minneapolis, and for a lot of those students, it was the first time they’d ever given a public reading, and they all brought down the house. I’ll never forget, one of my students read a poem that they’d written on a roll of receipt paper in response to a discussion we had on how to “steal” company time to write. They were all brilliant!

AAAAThe majority of students I got for this workshop were people between the ages of 20-30 who worked in food service. One thing I would have liked to improve on in this course is creating an inviting environment for people who aren’t within the bubble of the poetry community in Minneapolis. How do we get the 60 year-old janitor at the local high school who can’t afford to retire into these workshop spaces, the lunch ladies, the target clerks? The more people outside of the writing bubble that we welcome in, that we support materially, the more diverse stories are told. Labor is a particularly urgent facet of human life that we can look to for growing diverse writing communities.

SHANNAN

In some ways, “Watercolors” is the most spare poem here, however its vivid language instantly adds invisible depth to the piece. The poem opens with a striking image of "Dahlia soaked cotton", engaging so many of our senses. The “ammonia” in and of itself adds a suffocating element, clinical, chemical…scary in a scientific, distant way. And then, the poem employs the unexpected metaphor of a “song at work on repeat”  to capture the vulva. Here, I double-take and sense that the dahlia too is an incarnation of the vulva, and, in a larger sense, the speaker and their desires. Furthermore, the comparison to bubble wrap being popped silently with scissors adds a layer of both fragility and resilience. The entire piece is a poignant portrayal of enduring pain with a quiet resilience. And I’m also drawn to envisioning this as eco-poetry because of the way the feminine intersects with nature here. The closing lines address the "managers of the world” and the plea to "burrow in the snow" and wait for the lights to turn off suggests a need for respite and understanding from the world. The reference to ancestors dreaming, eating, and reading until the bleeding was over adds a historical and cultural layer to the poem, highlighting the shared experiences of women across time. Time that is both visceral and mystical. One of the key things this piece accomplishes is the way it expresses the pain normally silenced due to feelings of shame. I invite you to explore any of my connections and musings here. 

HALEE

I wrote “Watercolors” after reading Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon (translated by Don Mee Choi). I’m drawn to this poet’s surrealism, a style that I’ve found myself more and more drawn to recently. Surrealist poetry gifts me the language to describe menstruation without acquiescing to biological essentialism or cisgender finality of what menstruation is — how does the moon’s pull affect the non-binary speaker? How can we express the connections between menstruation and nature without naturalizing it as a “female” experience? One of the hallmarks of Surrealist visual art is the disembodiment of object —we see melting clocks, zephyr faces expanding in the sky. Hyesoon disembodies object, body, and subject as well. So I guess in a way, this poem objectifies anatomy, but I’m completely in control of it.

AAAATo speak to the overarching connection in this piece to retail labor and invisible pain, I recently decided to formally request the days I know I typically menstruate off from my bookstore work to honor this powerful time. There are so many messages out there for people to “get over it”, to power through our working day even when we’re doubled over in pain. It’s a narrative that replicates itself in colonial, capitalist society. The unseen pain of a worker is not allowed to stand in the way of profit. Even those who menstruate replicate this message to each other. However, I’ve read that, when we Ojibwe people were still able to practice our lifeways in peace, there would be a lodge built specifically for menstruating people to be away from the village, not in a sense that menstruation was “dirty”, but recognizing that it’s a very powerful time, a time that requires rest, reflection, and care. Maybe someday I’ll build a moon lodge for myself and my community, because menstrual leave should be a thing — we Ojibwe’s have known this for a long time! I’m claiming that space for myself now, and this poem is a declaration of that.

SHANNAN

Thank you so much for these nuanced and deeply honest answers, Halee! I hope more and more people take inspiration from your work and think about the folks in the working classes.

AAAAFinally, we would love to know which poets have influenced you most. 

HALEE

I first encountered a line from Rainer Maria Rilke as an epigraph to a YA werewolf romance in high school, and it triggered a deep obsession with that poet in particular as a teen, which sprouted from there. Richard Wright’s collected haiku are a touchstone text for me in terms of image building. Gretchen Marquette, who I’ve been lucky to call a mentor of mine, has influenced me in her celebration of the sacred and the profane. I am ever in debt to my peers and mentors through Indigenous Nations Poets, a national fellowship and collective of Native poets, including Heid Erdrich, Kimberly Blaeser, Elise Paschen, Jake Skeets, Sherwin Bitsui, and  Craig Santos Perez. That’s certainly more than 3-5, and I’m so tempted to name every one of my fellow fellows — they all continue to inspire and energize me every day!