Pawns & pieces tend toward certain behaviors.

Played chess with Zach last night, huddled into his homey breakfast nook while his sweet-natured dog (Grace?) occasionally stopped in for ear scratches and chess tips. The games were close. Zach & I seem to be on pretty much equal ground, i.e. we know that the knight moves all funny-like. I won both games. By Thor’s sacred hammer I tell you that the dead of Zach’s army littered that breakfast nook!

Playing chess reminded me of working the coffeehouse at Mary Washington when I was playing a lot of chess with Dave Carillo, Sam Rio, Andy Plava & other thuggy types. I spent a lot of time playing then and became pretty good. And yet I never actually knew what I was doing. I realize now that my entire middle-game is based on the approach of waiting around for my opponent to make a sillier mistake than I’ve made. Strategy, like analytical philosophy, is an interesting thing to study but not something I can actively employ.

Reread Anna Moschovakis’ The Blue Book chapbook & David Perry’s Range Finder in preparation for returning them (finally) to Anthony. Moschovakis wrote

Chess is a game of temptation and uncertainty.
Pawns & pieces tend toward certain behaviors.
Their patterns are seen as falling on the axis of strategy.
It is tempting to see human behavior patterns in terms of character.

I love the way her poem moves methodically through ideas with the structure of logic but the content of assertion and association. It is a fantastic chapbook. Perry’s work, on the other hand is viscerally playful, in syntax, diction and slipperiness. When he’s on it makes me sit a little straighter in my chair.

Biking downtown this morning I was thinking about Arthur Sze & all day I’ve been viewing the world in Arthur Sze lines:

A woman sips a hot mug of saltwater
Her tongue still sore from the night before
Styrofoam peanuts shuffle across the alley
A whippoorwill twice nods its head crisply
And then departs from the branch of the dead elm.

I guess there would be something about bitten nipples of something after that, or about a kind of calligraphy flourish or some other thing that I have no idea about. That’s the great thing about Sze, he tricks you into thinking he’s a poet of physical observation, but there is no central I/eye. His poems sometimes return to him as a speaker, but more often they create a new nexus via conglomeration.

Sara Chainsawleg Holmes is doing that lemon-saltwater cleanse thing that is all the rage. Master Cleanser, which sounds like an evil villain from an 80s kids cartoon.