Read on for a guest post by germ lynn on Amy Berkowitz’s Gravitas, available in the US from Total Joy and in Canada from Éditions du Noroît in a bilingual edition (French translation by Daphné B. and Marie Frankland).
5 lines from Amy Berkowitz’s “Gravitas” that slap: playlisting a rage read
by germ lynn
How do you know when a poem hits home? As a writer, reader, listener? Where is the gravitas? A psychic hush over the people huddled for the reading? Not a sounded thing, but something deeper, elsewise? A room that pales, breathes, or changes? Something that can’t be captured for the poets of Instagram, try as we may.
Maybe you are reading on a Zoom call and emojis are a-flutter, people drop their favorite lines in the chat. Again, a chorus but not sounded. Maybe you are a young woman in an MFA program and some man tells you where the gravitas is or isn’t. Maybe you are a kitchen poet at heart. The poet hits home because it is home. It's cooking, smoking, getting together with friends, playing silly games.
“Gravitas,” a collection of punchy poems by Amy Berkowitz, is, no doubt, a rage read. It doesn’t hold back; it unleashes on the abusers. And with a gaze trained on complicit institutions, Berkowitz sets her sights on the poems that survived what these abusers and their apologists did and failed to do, and in their silence, are still doing. She also, heartbreakingly, glances at the poems that didn’t survive the MFA program.
When a book of poems feels like a live wire, I try to stay with the trouble. Irreverence, righteous anger, catharsis, collective healing, collective authorship … these are the notes that resounded with a heavy thud after the book had been closed and inspired a playlist for my bike ride, my coffee, my lunch poems.
The line: I mean love, no, let the typo stay
The track: Wild Goose Chase by Dark Dark Dark
The first poem, the last line. The way time passes and we find ourselves in the same place. The things we can’t shake. The hard lessons we learned on a circular path. But then some little abandon appears as grace, fuck it. For all the “blood money,” for all appearances, this poem reminds me that we don’t have to sell our souls.
The line: Believing that poetry about the life of a young woman lacks gravitas
The track: Silvia by Marissa Nadler
The violence of that line. The alienation, the betrayal, and the cognitive dissonance. A line that calls me to mourn all the poets that I met in the belly of a whale, and then lost to some form of violence. The worst times of my life. In wicked rhyme, we understood each other. That's gravitas.
The line: As if it would be some grave disaster/ to dismantle a creative writing program
The track: Becky by Be Your Own Pet
That’s a cutting line. What would the very next day after the dismantling of a creative writing program that harbored an abuser for years look like? Eutopia is creeping like a smile. Yes to the spite, yes to the fantasy. Let’s hit them where it hurts.
The line: More of us would still be writing
The track: This Woman’s Work by Kate Bush
This begs the question: did this MFA program destroy more poets than it produced? Where there’s a culture of abuse, gaslighting, silencing … who can cope? The story that emerges out of all the rage is one of friendship as a form of survival. The compassion for other poets is raw and affecting; the gravitas of loss is deeply felt as an ache.
The line: Isn’t everything coming down?
The track: The End’s Not Near
The last poem, the last line. Berkowitz has stopped writing as one voice. But rather a choral body - The Washtenaw County Women’s Poetry Collective and Casserole Society. What began as a knot in the pit of the stomach doomscrolling Instagram in the alone of one’s time bubbled over into a froth and fit, and here at the very end, the author has faded into the poetry collective that might have saved her life. There’s an illicit hope that maybe after dismantling the institutions, or letting them crumble on their own, that we will get by just fine as kitchen poets, as collectives, as lapsed poets … how much of a poem do you really remember? Maybe a line or two? Even then, it probably isn’t the trick of the language, the virtuosity behind the composing of the lines, but the gravitas. With spare and bold language, Berkowitz deals in gravitas. And says fuck you to any professor or program that thinks a poem is worth hurting people, over and over, and never having to speak to it. This is an urgent read that cuts to the heart. And it slaps.