Geraldine Kim & Amy Berkowitz on Very Tender Points

Geraldine Kim interviews Bay Area poet Amy Berkowitz about her forthcoming book Tender Points (Timeless Infinite Light). They discuss, in striking honesty, the issues that inform Berkowitz's work, which Kim finds is non-fiction: chronic pain, call-out culture, female writers, rape culture and disability, and more. Here's a look:

[Geraldine Kim]: I felt like Tender Points did a really good job in that it was thoughtful and conceptual but it was also really emotional/hard. I felt engaged with the content but the form was also really interesting—it felt almost like a philosophical treatise that was leading up to something…

[Amy Berkowitz]: Did you feel like it led up to something?

GK: I felt it did. There was an accelerative feeling to it… [The quotes felt] like philosophical evidence for a point. [And] I could see how one point led to another. It all felt seamless. Even though it “looks” fragmented, it didn’t feel that way.

AB: Good! To some extent—I didn’t think of this at the time, because I generally like the style of mixing quotes with personal narrative—the book is a little bit preoccupied with, “Hey, I’m going to tell you this in a way that you’re going to believe me.” The “male drag” or what I call “écriture féminine en homme.” Undermining male authority by adopting a male voice.

That’s why I so firmly want prose here. Sentences. Periods. Male certainty. These are facts. No female vocal fry. No uptalk. No question about what I tell you. No metaphor. Go ahead. Fact check. “Did I stutter.” Fuck off. (24)

GK: What are you working on now?

AB: I’m thinking about writing fiction focused on some of the same issues I touch on in the book: rape culture and disability.

GK: Why fiction?

AB: I feel terrible doing this to poetry, but I feel really frustrated with what I perceive to as poetry’s limitation to reach people who don’t already read poetry. [Laughs] You’re making a face.

GK: Yup.

AB: Tell me about that face?

GK: I agree! But at the same time, I don’t really connect to most writing/fiction that’s not aware of its artifice somehow.

Read it all at Weird Sister.