1 Poem by Eric Tyler Benick
Chevengur
-after Courtney Bush and Andrey Platonov
Say what you will about a circle jerk––
it’s the last time I knew who my true friends were.
On the topic of THE RUSSIANS, Courtney tells me
she’d like to write six hundred pages about the soul.
We disagree about whether or not ours is the same world as theirs.
She is correct in saying that it is but I am slow to believe it.
In Chevengur the characters point to an invisible future
and call it Communism and this very act does the work of the soul.
Soon a credible harmony emerges––the trees, the rivers, the crops,
and the horses all subsist on the promise of Communism.
This is meant to be obvious criticism but I cling to it. I rent a car
and drive up and down the Hudson Valley looking for Communism.
I touch the trees, the river, the crops, the horses, but there’s no Communism.
This is not the first time I’ve followed a thread to its embarrassing end.
I have no gift for narrative. I read the same Levis poem over and over
and am no less stunned each time I arrive at the end. How did he do that?
I ask no one, even though the answer is in front of me. I begin to wonder
if my failure in narrative is also the failure of my soul. I tell Courtney
I could never write a novel because I don’t like what it does to my brain,
but perhaps I mean what it does to my soul. The poem is different.
The poem is a soul that we inhabit. It accounts for everyone,
expands to contain our failure and then floats off inscrutably.
The poem is the promise of Communism. It makes the river more
than a river and the horses more than horses. The poem is always pointing
somewhere beyond itself. It is fair to say that I have exploited the poem––
meaning, I have exploited its soul. It does the work that I am not capable of doing.
My collective power is a few strands of hair. I have always relied upon
the fact that I can run away. In the poem you can always run away
because there is a river, or horses, to do the meaning for you.
In the novel you always have to arrive, even if the arrival never comes.
When the characters arrive in Chevengur there is still more
arriving to be done, but this is satisfied by its own irony.
I don’t understand irony but, like Communism, I know it
when I see it. It’s hard to say if I was ever truly married
because I never truly arrived––or, I was never true.
I was always pointing somewhere beyond the present––
a poem, a horse, a great old city, a different shape of love.
I worry that I am still trying to get to Chevengur
to await my own arrival. It is true, I love the power
of collectivity, but I have done nothing to demonstrate this.
When we were boys crowded around the new erotic image,
each of us holding one another for the first time,
I grew so grey with embarrassment that I turned my back
on all of them and began plotting my escape.
I can’t even trust that this memory ever happened,
but it recurs with a salience not unlike truth
and maybe that’s as good as anything gets. The truth,
like Communism, is prevaricated by our vain attempts to know it.
I love the poem because it uses its truth to avoid telling the truth.
Although I fear I have been doing this for years––my privacy
a form of mendacity. When I told my wife I loved her
I wasn’t lying, but it wasn’t the whole of the feeling either.
In a novel the character will demonstrate this through an affair.
The poem is less dramatic, a tactful use of enjambment will do––
salmon drowning or an osprey hitting glass believing it is the sky.
The poem, unlike marriage, allows me to be duplicitous.
To understand that capitalism is inherently evil does not make Communism
impervious to similar evils. This is the tragic irony in Chevengur.
A replacement of a system does not immediately solve the systemic abuse,
a demagogue no less poisonous than a hegemon, etc––Hegel’s dialectic
turning its convoluted circle. I always thought I was a decent person
until I fell in love, which showed me forms of harm I never thought
myself capable of. I had believed my marriage to be Communism
but soon I was imperious, awaiting another form of arrival
ready to turn my back again on the intimacy that held me.
The dissolution of property only made me covetous. I invented
new desires, new currencies, new forms of power. The nature of love
is quixotic––like the novel. It does not solve the systems of abuse.
The novel teaches me that my desire to be loved is fused
with my systems of abuse. The poem teaches me that my father’s
violence is reified by the disastrous flight patterns of the osprey.
They both teach me about the poor state of my soul,
which I have always suspected––my flight patterns like my father’s,
never sticking around to sort out what anything means. I return
to Chevengur where Communism has corrected the human need
for love. It was not love that drew me to the circle in the first place,
but a secret, pragmatic Communism––each friend’s hand a guarantor,
each climax a social contract. It was love that pulled me away,
its Orphic sacrifice, its shame. Something is broken. When I look at the river
I only see the river flowing uselessly like the river of a novel. I want to love
the river again, and by the river, I mean, the horses, and by the horses,
I mean, the poem, and by the poem I mean––by the poem I mean.
Eric Tyler Benick is a writer from Tennessee currently based in Brooklyn. His poetry collections include Terracotta Fragments (Antiphony, 2026) and the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023) He is a founding editor of Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His work has appeared in Apartment, Bennington Review, Brooklyn Review, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, Puerto Del Sol, Tyger Quarterly and elsewhere.