Aaron Winslow Talks to Holly Melgard About the Labor Behind Divisions of Labor

Air/Light's Aaron Winslow did us all a favor and interviewed the brilliant Holly Melgard for the new journal's ongoing first issue! The conversation includes a bonus audio recording of Melgard reading from Divisions of Labor (Make Now Books, 2020) as part of the Segue Reading Series in December of 2013. "[I]s Melgard prolific?" asks Winslow. "You bet. A genius? Most definitely. A worthy heir to the poetics of Bernadette Mayer and Diane di Prima? 100% yes." From their talk:

Aaron Winslow: So, as you know, I love Divisions of Labor — by translating the sounds of labor into written word, you emphasize not only the division between language and writing, but also manage to cross wires. How did this poem come about?

Holly Melgard: I made and first performed Divisions of Labor back in 2012 for an audience that was a mix of energized and appalled by it. The poem itself is a transcribed, alphabetized list of sounds uttered by women in labor on youtube. After I performed it in Philadelphia, some audience members complained that I had no right to work with such material because I “have never been in labor before,” which confused me, because I definitely attended my own birth.

But their anger was encouraging.

I originally made the poem while processing two converging issues occurring in my life as a budding poet-scholar: 1) Seeing my generation’s fiscal and ecological future become mortgaged by its predecessors, all while experiencing insidiously exploitative labor practices as a student worker in an institution that left far too many of us with a lifetime of debt and no professional path to pay it off. 2) The huge “achievement” disparities in my own field for females and caregivers (parent-friends were warning me that the experimental poetry community made little to no space for children/mothers/parents at readings, female colleagues coached me on downplaying my childbearing prospects to seem more hirable to prospective university employers, and some poet-scholar-friends even explained the ultimatum between getting to tenure and childrearing because doing both was near impossible, all while working in a graduate program where even though the men out-numbered the women, the women still did the majority of unpaid, administrative labor).…

Please read on at Air/Light.