The Fragment & its Evidence: Interview with Eric Tyler Benick
Interviewed by b mossotti

b mossotti: Terracotta Fragments is not the first collection of your fragmented poetics—there is an extensive mapping within your work (see, also: Memory Field: A Travelogue of Forgetting) that reckons with the fragment itself. But memory and history are not the only fragmentations. Your work alludes, also, to the body. Each facet—the chambers of the heart, “the nipples of a fool”, the “kingdoms of…vulvas”—are amalgamated. I wonder how the body itself, the gendered one at that, exists as one of the only contexts we are able to move with.

Eric Tyler Benick: I write a lot about the body, this is true. Gender is a construct, or a context, rather than a fixed ontology: we know this. The bodies in the Fragments are often removed from any such context and thus exist without a circumspect gender. They are malleable, but this is not to say they are apolitical. The body is the thing we move through the poems with because the body is the thing we move with. I am not very spiritual, and so all of my experiences have been phenomena of the corporeal space. I think as a form of historical materialism the body is an important reminder of the effects of empire, of colonization, of the myriad crimes against the public which are often lost from our collective memory once they are no longer embodied. It is not a coincidence that we call the largest portion of a text the “body”, or a writer’s collection a “body of work,” or the leviathan of the state its “body politic.” The body is our evidence, but it is not always whole. Terracotta Fragments is specifically interested in investigating the mysterious originary sources of these amalgamated parts, even if the only solution is to invent them.

BM: Each piece is eleven lines: not quite ‘even’ in their formal stability. Talk to me about your urge towards this form and the poems’ physical shape.

ETB: I wrote the first fragment and ended on eleven. I thought: “I like eleven.” I grew up watching This Is Spinal Tap religiously, so I probably hold eleven somewhere pretty deep in my unconscious mind. Eleven is odd and prime and what I was writing felt odd and indivisible, so it was natural. Funnily enough, I have just started a new book project with my friend and poet, Courtney Bush, where we are rewriting the Lyrical Ballads (yes, this is real). I am taking on Wordsworth’s portion of the book (the heavier portion) and was rereading “The Thorn” recently which is a poem in twenty three parts, with each part in eleven lines. I studied the Romantics a lot as an undergrad, so I probably stole eleven from Wordsworth too. Each poem generally constructs a square. I am attracted to the evenness of the square to contrast the oddness of the lines. I am squaring up my oddities, I suppose. 

BM: Many lines in this collection can be read as individual poetic lines; some declarative, some argumentative. But there are moments of breakage, of overflown lines leading to the next (“we are arrested on sight for indecency / and sentenced to ourselves, naked and duplicitous”). Can you tell me more about your relationship with the poetic line and the breakage of your own formal interventions? In other words, when the constraint is unrestrained.

ETB: I believe that I begin to answer this in question three. The only constraint in TF  is “eleven”, and I am dogmatically consistent about that in the book. I love to work in monostich and aim for every line to be complete unto itself, but sometimes that happens in two lines. Sometimes the appeal of enjambment is far too sexy to let go neglected. I am not a very obedient writer, so I am always intervening on my interventions. It’s really a wonder how I get anything done.

BM: I’m drawn to your idea of obedience. It makes me consider, then, the authority of the poetic line. Could you talk more about this—your urge to be disobedient, or to which authority you are disobedient against?

ETB: The authorial voice is already a kind of authority. No one creates in a vacuum or without some kind of guidance. Every artist has their own canon that is largely responsible for why they are drawn to their specific medium. For me, that canon is very serious, and I am very serious about what I do and intend it to be taken seriously. However, the act of taking one’s work too seriously begins to make a bit of a despot out of the artist. You find yourself saying no to things far more than you say yes. While yes is also dangerous, I believe in a dialectical balance to keep me from becoming a tyrant but also from being a sycophant. The writer is the authority of their own work, and the writer’s authority can also get in the way of what the work wants to be. In the Fragments specifically, I did not want to intervene too much on which images were asking to be included. Darryl Strawberry wanted to be in the collection, so I let him. Clive Barker’s Cenobites wanted in, so I let them in. Benny Hill, Laurel and Hardy, Sacco and Vanzetti, all of them asked to be in the collection, so who am I to say no? Each is invaluable in their own way. Disobedience exposes the fact that authority is fallow and arbitrary. 

BM: Your line, “another phallic monument goes limp,” captures a particular thread of your work: the gender of history, of empire. Phallicity is rooted so deeply in progress, conquering, and futurity. For me, this line makes me question what could happen when all the monuments, albeit physical or symbolic, go “limp”. Could you share more about the gendering of history, empire, and the body in your work?

ETB: This is probably some moldy Freudian byproduct perverting my work, but yes, we are living the direct result of thousands of years of conquest, colonization, industrialization, homogenization, etc all predicated on the cultural hegemony of a specifically gendered display of sociopolitical power. We have colonized the land beyond its capacity to endure us. We have erased civilizations, languages, oral histories, species of plant, insect, and animal all for the delusional grand narrative of “human progress”. We are currently data mapping every online citizen’s attention span and subconscious interest as an insidious tool and archive of psychopower. There are like five tech oligarchs who own like ninety percent of major media outlets and their subsidiaries. We are hellbent on potentially obliterating ourselves for the acute financial margins of AI. All of this done through historically masculine machinations of weaponization and dominion. That’s the political side. The other side is adjacent to Art History where if you spend any amount of time around Greek, Roman, Egyptian, or Oceanic art, the phallus is everywhere, peering at you, antagonizing you to reconcile with it. It’s an inundating symbolic likeness that none of us asked for. We are perhaps in need of a semiotic castration to save humanity. Maybe a literal one too. 

BM: We will always be left with fragments—terracotta tabloids, marble buttresses, sea glass, plastic bags. We also leave the world in fragments—ecological destruction, genocide, erasure of history. Even if not every piece is archived, how can poetic fragments be evidence of history, of ‘now’, for the futures we don’t know yet?

ETB: These questions are all very fragment-centric. You have probably considered the significance of the fragment as a legible footnote to our existence more than I have. I will say a fragment is evidence whether or not it is archived. Some fragments remain in situ. The paradox of Terracotta Fragments is that it is both. If I am the “author” of these lines then their position in my book leaves them in situ, however, if I am also admitting that their origins or provenance are appropriated, then I have also made an archive of them. This hardly scratches the surface of your much more expansive question which I don’t really have an answer for. My attraction to the fragment is the fact of its poetics, that it enjambs our attempts to manufacture linearity, that it makes a literal poem of history. The fragment is evidence alone, undeniably so. I am not the least bit worried that we will leave plenty behind to serve as evidence of our time here, of what we witnessed, suffered, endured, or how we were destroyed. I am worried about the inevitable moment when there will be no one left to discover it.