Holly Melgard and I met on Tuesday, June 6th in her Brooklyn apartment to discuss her two recent books, Fetal Position (Roof, 2021) and Read Me: Selected Works, coming out on Ugly Duckling Presse in Fall 2023, which collects a decade and a half of her writings across media and genre, from performance scores to fiction, poetry, book arts, and essays on poetics. I was eager to ask her about a number of aspects of her wide-ranging work.
Lewis Freedman: Holly, the last time we spoke, a couple of weeks ago, we acted like it was just practice for the real conversation, and then we proceeded to actually have a really succinct real conversation about your work, but we refused to record it at the time, imagining it was preparation for this, the real interview. Why did we do that to ourselves?
Holly Melgard: Good question. And there was also that very involved interview we made years ago that we never recorded or published that would have been book-length had we transcribed it, remember that? Didn’t we talk on the phone for like three hours?
LF: We had three separate, more than hour long meetings.
HM: Yeah, we really have developed a pattern of doing this to ourselves when we attempt these interviews together, haven’t we. I remember the first time we produced an untranscribable interview together, we had completed our PhD’s around that same period, and in that phase of our lives, I remember us being like, “it's got to be book-length to be valid,” like, “it needs to be huge and labored to be good enough” and “it has to hurt to be real”—or at least that seems to be the pain we kept acting out by operating that way. It’s like we’re reliving the wound of that self-torturous, dissertating mindset when we do this, and we get stuck there, dwelling together, whether out of familiarity and comfort. Lol.
LF: Well, this is going to be a shorter interview! I want to begin by asking you a question about a sentence in “Lesser Person,” a poem of yours in your 2021 Roof Book Fetal Position that I read as a kind of key to a complex of concerns that run through your poetry. “Lesser Person” is written in the voice of a mother who describes her adoptive son’s disturbances in sharp psychobabble detail, while revealing her own difficulties with maternal attachment. You write there, “The fetal position is a meditation on the form” and I was wondering whether you might consider this sentence with regard to the abundance and variety of formal play that runs through both of your recent books?
HM: Great question. The book Fetal Position fixates on what emerges when various forms of “fetal position” are stacked together, from sympathizing with the fetal position by identifying with the innocent or the victim who curls their body into a ball, to transcribing the language of fetuses in the womb, fetuses emerging from vaginas, or children who exist in a state prior to language. Sometimes it transcribes the language of a maternal figure who projects onto the nascent their own self-interested narratives, which fail to account for the experience of their creations. And other times it follows the language of the hurt who, through this defensive stance, proceed to replicate their harm in those around them.
My fixation on the “fetal position” as a form comes from studying different theories and philosophies about poeisis, wanting to better track the labor of that which brings forth the new. When I started the book, I sought to expand notions of poeisis to include the role that the maternal figure plays in events of emergence.
I kept looping on this when I was in grad school studying poetics — a term that literally means the bringing forth of the new! — where I saw first hand how academia can exclude maternally breeding people. I was quietly advised by friends and colleagues early on to choose whether to have a child or pursue a career in higher ed, because "achieving both would be highly unlikely if not impossible."
But by the end of writing the book, my focus shifted from primarily tracking the maternal position to tracking the role that the nascent played in that scene of emergence (or poeisis). More and more over the course of writing the book, our mainstream news outlets like MSNBC and FOX began increasingly repackaging the news in the form of victim narratives: “These people want to take your freedoms from you,” “Your Christian/family/democratic values are under attack,” “White people are being replaced”, etc. Appealing to an audience’s identification with a victim narrative is a really effective tool for mobilizing people to want to harm each other, and a tactic in genocide propaganda that we’ve seen in history before—pushing people to feel small so they seek to make themselves bigger by identifying with the violent supremacy of a dominant group. To me it felt like no coincidence that the educational foundations of American culture are built to debase maternal labor, our academic narratives about poeisis can’t seem to account for the role of maternal labor in the making of our literature, and our news pushes us all to curl up into the fetal position constantly. But exactly how or why these pieces fit together is something I still puzzle over, and so the book attempts synthesis.
In retrospect, I realize now that it also takes a page from Dick Higgins’ theory of intermedia —the idea that combining previously separate forms into novel combinations initiates encounters with the new that can expand our channels of perception. My super idealist hope was that this act of synthesis in Fetal Position would enable new ways for us to disrupt old patterns of thought (like misogyny and violence) scoring our attunement to each other.
LF: As you’re saying this I’m reminded of how significantly a play with forms of repetition animates your writing and I get a thought that goes something like, “all forms exist through repetition and are thus protective and protected,” like how in assuming the fetal position one is both overcome by the repeating experience of one’s hurt and is also protecting oneself from the repetition of that experience.
HM: Oh, yeah. I mean, that's what Freud says. He says in The Pleasure Principle that when the nucleus of the cell is overstimulated by too much new, i.e. random and chaotic, stimulus it responds by vibrating until it forms a crust. And so in that sense, repetition is this vibration of emotions, the activity of which creates this protective membrane that shelters us from the corrosion of over-exposure to the new.
Holly Melgard, from Black Friday. Troll Thread, 2012
I need to live in a world that does not conflate suppressing the impulse to repeat with the denial that repetition exists at all.
LF: Your response brings to mind another moment in “Lesser Person” in which the narrating voice of the poem, describing her traumatized son, says “this loop he lives that is his primal trauma is the real echo chamber sheltering him from the world beyond,” and this in turn reminds me of your essay, “Echochambermusics: Notes Toward a Trauma-Informed Poetry Pedagogy” in your new selected works READ ME, which so clearly and movingly describes the centrality of trauma and repetition to your poetics. Could you say more about the echo chamber and how you relate the music of the echo to the repeating structure of traumatic experience?
HM: Yeah definitely. Throughout my academic career, I’ve been surrounded by people who believe and frequently explain to me that “there is no such thing as repetition in poetry,” you know, following Gertrude Stein's belief in “Portraits and Repetition.” READ ME begins at the point in my work when I began trying to square that mantra in my poetry community with my own experience as someone who comes from a family with a lot of PTSD in it. PTSD is a form of cognition that lives at the mercy of the loop of experiencing history repeating, even when others can’t see it.
A big part of the drama in my family stories revolves around people being driven to replicate their own harm in their loved ones. This is a big reason I could not reconcile the history of repeating violence in my own family history with the frequently regurgitated rumor that repetition does not exist in poetry. And so I began exploring all these different forms of repetition through poetry as a result. The essay goes on to ask what it means to continue denying the existence of repetition at this stage in capital we now live in where trauma has become so truly ubiquitous.
Like I remember reading a lot of Robert Duncan in the SUNY Buffalo Poetry Collection, and he said somewhere in his notebooks (I don’t remember where now) that ratio is the basis of discrimination—like to articulate a ratio is to discriminate, he believed. Only by naming a group as a group, in other words, could discrimination occur. “So let's never pattern recognize” was the implication. But I have to be able to name patterns in order to get outside of the world of harm that was handed to me. I have to be able to notice and point to patterns of repeated behaviors and looping stories to be able to resist the impulse to recreate my own harm in those around me.
I need to live in a world that does not conflate suppressing the impulse to repeat with the denial that repetition exists at all. The stakes are too high to keep ignoring the impact that repeating forms of violence have on today’s poets and future generations of poets who will come after them. A lot of this work unfolded alongside the arrival of important movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, which sought change by calling attention to patterns of oppression. It feels like urgent work to renovate this baseline in poetry pedagogy which defers to Stein’s explanation and thus denies the valid labor of naming repetitions for what they are. Stein might have said that “there’s no such thing as repetition,” but she also said that “it’s the soothing thing about history that it repeats.” If there’s one thing my own family history has taught me, it’s that ignoring trauma only causes it to repeat itself worse.
LF: Sorry if I’m repeating the same question again here, but I’m wondering if you could speak more specifically to the musical dimension of “Echochambermusics”? How does the looping of trauma manifest for you in the music of your poems?
HM: What I’ve found useful about calling my poetry an “echochambermusic” is that there are so many underutilized possibilities for poetry when we start thinking and talking critically about repetition as present in our work and stop pretending it isn’t there. Musical repetition is a non-regressive material, amongst other creative properties, that is available to us for use, which we can manipulate, play with and explore, create with so as to model something else. Treating repetition like a musical rather than poetic property has helped me acknowledge repetition as an undeniable dimension and subject in my work with less guilt about failing to assimilate to the word’s common usage in poetry’s discourse. Because certainly we have to admit that there's repetition in music, right? A sound only becomes a note when it repeats. Repetition leads to the building of a theme and a chorus in a song, right? Like, you only have so many keys on piano. And it's because those octaves repeat but at different registers that you get some range of expressivity. Music, as a medium, engages repetition as a material component of the composition in more undeniable ways than poetry can it would seem.
Now, I don’t mean to suggest that we ought to emigrate to the adjacent medium of music like some kind of pastoral escape from our own aesthetic disagreements in poetry or something. I’m no expert on music or its discourse, but surely a lot of twentieth century art across media was focused on not repeating after holocaust, following Adorno’s argument that to avoid future calamity, never again should we “compose music that could be marched to” (rhythm being marchable only when the cadence repeats). After all, the objective to not repeat is what has made noise music such a sustained, brilliant movement over the decades. But any conscious effort to not repeat acknowledges as its starting point that repetition happens when we make no effort to prevent it. So what’s the use in denying its existence altogether in poetry were it not for the reality of its threat ? Even though no one steps in the same river twice, it is only because a note is replicable that another person can come along and harmonize with that note or come along hundreds of years later and still be able to read and play a piece of music.
Treating musical repetition as something hermetic that might not translate beyond the echochamber of the writer’s own account of their work also gives me a way to write in relation to repetition without assuming it is also necessarily there for the reader. Operating in relation to repetition that exists for one but not all is a situation in language that I constantly navigate when communicating with traumatized family members. I don’t doubt finding more workarounds in language to communicate in relation to trauma will become more common in this post-Covid world in which we are moving further and further into a period of climate catastrophe and economic turbulence, and thus trauma becomes a more common baseline for the general population.
LF: What you’re saying brings up all the frustration I had in certain poetry pedagogy spaces where a repeated advice, assumed to be logically sound, was that a word, once used, should not be used again in proximity, which struck me always as pathological given the basic structure of repetition in language, how a word doesn’t “mean” except through the repetition of its usage. Sorry, I’m getting wound up, there’s no question here…
HM: Yeah, totally. Like on the one hand, the repetition of a word as it recurs across a poem thickens that word’s meaning, right? But the repetition of a word also corrodes and evacuates a word’s given signification by multiplying and thus destabilizing its meaning. Repetition, in this way, is a really useful technique for a writer, because it enables us to not just add meaning to something, but it also enables us to dismantle inherent meanings that don’t work for us any more. Repetition gets used to explode the stability of the words we live by every day. I’ll never forget George W Bush repeating the line “the terrorists want to take away your freedom” until the word “freedom” didn’t mean anything anymore, all while literally banning mass protest and implementing free speech zones as he went. I just think that if we actually want writing to have any kind of impact or effect in the world, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of repetition as an efficient tool for renovating words and meanings that don’t work for us anymore. Repetition is a profound instrument for subtraction in this way.
I just think that if we actually want writing to have any kind of impact or effect in the world, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of repetition as an efficient tool for renovating words and meanings that don’t work for us anymore.
LF: So I’m curious, and please forgive all the repetition here, but how exactly do you deal with the problem and potential of repetition when you’re working through a longer poem like “Inner Critic” or “Catcall” or an essay like “Echochambermusics”?
HM: There’s purposeful repetition, which for me is a big part of the fun of writing, but then there’s the terror of accidental repetition that I didn’t put in my writing on purpose. I try not to delete it when I find it, because I think there’s a lot of dense, complex information to unpack in the accidental repetition I make in my writing. Ideally, when I find it happening in the work, and I have the impulse control to resist deleting it, I try wherever possible to stop and go through a whole secondary process of operations, assessing why that's happening and what the repetition is attempting to cover over.
This is also something I do when I teach essay writing and I see students repeating themselves accidentally, nine times out of ten it's because they are trying to speak a thought at the same moment that the thought is changing on them. So when I’m with students doing this, often the first thing I do is try to stop them before they delete it, and ask them to say more about complex thought emerging from under that repetition on the page. And from there, it’s just a matter of allowing more space to work through and make sense of that complex idea that demands more patience, nuanced care and hedging language to emerge. Of course the emergent thought is almost an entirely new and unexpected thought for the student, which I enjoy, because I get to play midwife to their own ideas.
I try to do that for myself when I catch myself repeating, but I don’t always have the strength or wherewithal to notice my own aversion to a new idea I’m having before deleting it. For example, in my own writing, I constantly catch myself looping about the story of pseudo-indentured servitude in my own academic life: Even though I pursued a PhD to earn financial stability and a room of my own (I thought the point of jobs for academics was to provide this), trying to become a professor as a non-pedigreed, working-class person has resulted in taking on so much unavoidable debt to get the degree that I'll never pay it off with the adjunct wages that I earn. This wound is so deeply linked with my notion of audience that I bring it up in almost everything that I write. I’m constantly losing time to the labor of stopping, addressing the depth of the thought that’s repeating, clearing way for the new thought to emerge, and deleting redundant points made about it along the way. Most of the time though, I’m not saying anything new about that problem, other than ensuring that whoever reads my work is aware that it’s a problem I can’t ignore. I want to be in better control of that repetition than I am, unfortunately. But approaching repetition in my writing with a methodology of not deleting it I hope allows for the voicing of more ideas that frame the writing. Adjunctification of the university frames our discourse as academically trained poets, so why hide that from the reality of our poems?
LF: Yeah, it’s like forms of trauma that structure the subject are things that one can't help but repeat. So then your trick is to make space for the things that can’t not repeat?
HM: Yeah totally. The frame informs the work in the same way that, as Adorno said, “content is sedimented in the form.” But like in sound, when you hold a microphone up to a speaker, and you make a feedback loop, all it does is create this deafening noise until, if you do it long enough, the speaker blows out. Repetition is a corrosive, volatile property in this way, so I try to use it carefully. That foundational narrative of my austerity as an adjunct and the lifetime of debt I owe as a result of it—that's like the bedrock on which I’m building all this work. Paradoxically, it’s the repetition of that destabilizing narrative that actually gives me some sense of continuity and stability. So I guess repetition is something I think I collaborate with more than I believe I can control. But that’s what’s so exciting about engaging with it!
Just in the act of repeating the stories I tell myself, themes emerge, which is how READ ME came together as a volume. Like in a life that is experienced in unstable ways, when stability is not a given, what do we have to create in order to shelter what we make from the exposure to corrosive elements? Vygotsky would say that repeating the stories I tell myself—the “approximal learning zone”—gives me the illusion of shelter as I venture beyond the known. Repeating one’s self plays a crucial role in writing, especially as someone who experiences the world as an unstable place, it is essential. I can't speak for others but, that’s what it’s like at least for me anyway.
(L, R) Holly Melgard - from Reimbursement. Troll Thread, 2013
LF: I relate strongly to this, and I wonder about the related self-narrative I’m often caught in, in which the crisis of my life is that I’m lacking the stability to write in the ways I wish I could write, but still, despite this, make lots of writing. I’m wondering to what degree this narrative of the crisis is in fact some condition for the production of writing, and to what degree are its loops handed to us by conventions in our larger literary culture?
HM: When Virginia Woolf said, “a writer needs a room of their own, and financial stability to write,” I was like, “That must mean I'm not a writer, because I don't have those things.” And either us repeating that story to ourselves when we write means that we're not writing and the writing we make doesn't count—or we repeat it so as to respond to it, knowing that that sentiment is just propaganda for a certain kind of bourgeoise notion of writing that doesn't include us. I'm inclined to think that actually we're making writing all the time under very difficult conditions, but it's a matter of expanding what counts as writing and intelligence, and not conforming ourselves to only ever mirroring what it's supposed to look like.
LF: I agree. With that Virginia Woolf statement, she is speaking from the position of what she is already deprived of as a woman. Would you say then that Woolf’s phrase bears patriarchal imagination of what writing is?
HM: Oh absolutely. She's replicating her own wound in her audience by saying that. “We repeat what we have yet to master,” my therapist is always reminding me. Lol. But if we only regurgitate her definition of writing and never expand beyond that, the majority of my favorite contemporary poetry doesn’t count as writing. And what purpose does it serve to disqualify forms of intelligence in writing?
LF: I wish to note here that we’re finding it difficult to depart from a repetition of speaking about repetition in this interview and it’s a little disorienting. I mean, I keep thinking how I haven’t even asked you about some of the works in READ ME where the dynamics of repetition carry the poem’s meaning most overtly, like in “Black Friday” or “Poems for Baby.” I mean is the only way out of repetition thru?
HM: I would think so. Most of the poems are playing with repetition in one way or another in READ ME. I heard Fellini say in an interview once “every artist needs a parent, a grain or an enemy to work against.” In the twenty years that quote has bounced around in my head, I’ve become convinced that the grain the artist works against is that thing that repeats. The grain I’ve been working against for the span of all the work included in the Selected has been using poetry to widen critical consciousness about repetition, expanding what counts as intelligence via this collaboration with repetition.
But you know, I have to say, I don’t think that when we talk about this thing we’re calling “repetition,” I really don’t think the term itself is all that stable or legible even to each other. When you describe something as a repetition, you're collapsing differences between the various forms of those things, and differences between our two perspectives make it difficult for us to agree on the fact of any two things really being one thing repeating and not several discretely distinct and separate things. There's a million different ways of articulating what we’re calling “repetition” and there are countless theories I could cite about it. With each example that I cite, as Stein would say, “the difference is spreading.”
I recently went to this academic conference on repetition, and my take away at the end of it was that no two people speak exactly the same language when we talk about it. The topic of repetition itself is like a Tower of Babel, where communication surrounding it as a subject breaks down the minute we start talking about it. But the noise that that kind of substance produces to me indicates that it must be ripe for engaging as a subject through poetry, which I think is why I’ve gotten so much mileage out of it as a writer over the years.
LF: Ok, one last question. I’ve really been wanting to ask you about the ways in which you write voice, the ways in which you include speech-patterns in the voices of your poems. What is this complex relationship between written and spoken language in your work?
HM: Well, to answer that, and here I promise I will stop going on about repetition after this one last detail—
LF: —No no it’s best to repeat what you need to—
HM: —Thank you! Well see the thing is, the speech act is a really important thing that happens when we talk about repetition with each other. Working with Dennis Tedlock at SUNY Buffalo before he passed left a big impression on much of what ended up in READ ME. His work focused on creating notation systems for transcribing non-verbal dimensions of language and communication that aren’t captured by the lettered-word in the expository tradition. I spent a lot of time exploring his field-recordings, transcriptions, and translations of stories told in non-colonial and indigenous languages. His work taught me that I could use my time in poetry to expand what intelligence looks like on the page and never run out of important work to do. This only made me more obsessed with notating musical reasoning and repetition on my own pages as a result.
We pretend that all the information we need to communicate can be housed by the technology of the written, lettered-word, and a lot of the drama of our modern lives revolves around the interpersonal consequences that can arise from that assumption. I can’t count how many hours I’ve lost trying to deduce tone in text messages and rushed emails. That problem is a huge source of struggle for me as someone who was raised by family (for whom terrible things were done to them) that taught me to always expect the worst in people. Trauma studies tells us that tone, cadence and mirroring of rhythms in our speech patterns as we talk to each other is the biggest indication of agreement and disagreement as we talk (not the content of the words themselves), and these queues are often something I need in order to detect safety in a conversation with someone. But those acoustic dimensions are so easily omitted and underestimated in most utilitarian written correspondence, and the absence of these queues I think activates a lot of anxiety and conflict for most folks. The musical patterns in this conversation we are having through this interview won’t be included in the published version, and translating those dimensions is a labor that convention pressures us to hide and mask. There's so much vibratory musical reasoning that goes into communication, even for the hearing impaired, who also engage in mirroring non-verbal body language as a way of indicating agreement. Today, with so much communication produced through the screens of our devices, we suffer all the time from failing to notate the echoes we would otherwise exchange in embodied conversation, which serve as a baseline for understanding each other.