Pounding In The New Year

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

Ezra Pound

A troublesome figure in the Arts to be sure, but what I carry away from Ezra Pound is the same thing I learn from chess. Rigor. Repetition. Condensing things down to what is important. As a younger poet I often reveled in an excess of word choice, large stanzas that grew untamed like an English backyard, redolent with strange flowers and unnamed shrubbery.

Reading Pound again in grad school in my 40’s brought a new perspective. My poetry morphed again, pared down to not the simple, but the weightiest, the densest with meaning, portent, implication. This is much the same in chess. The amount of possible positions on the board increase exponentially with every move, from the initial 20 open to white on the first move to 9 million possible positions by the time both players have moved three times. And that particular hedgerow has hardly begun to grow and flower.

But as there is the perfect word in a poem for the moment, there are best moves in chess for the moment. The pandemic has stripped away many distractions from me, and allowed me to hone both. I hope it has done the same for you.