Richard Chess
March 2007

Richard Chess is the author of two collections of poetry, Tekiah and Chair in the Desert.  His third collection, Third Temple, will be published by the University of Tampa Press in February 2007.  His poems have appeared in Best American Spiritual Poetry 2005 as well as in a number of journals including Image, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Slate, the Forward, Tampa Review, and others.  Several of his poems are anthologized in Telling and Remembering: A Century of American-Jewish Poetry and The Sacred Place.  He has taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and he has been writer-in-residence at the Brandeis Bardin Institute.  He was born in Los Angeles and grew up in South Jersey.   From 1976 – 1979, he lived in Israel (about a year in Safed followed by two years in Jerusalem).  He is professor of literature and language at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.  He directs UNCA’s Center for Jewish Studies as well as the Creative Writing Program at UNCA.  He lives with his wife, son, and two step daughters in Asheville.


Statement: Not Your Bubbe’s Chicken Soup

A little Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Creation) to get me going: 

And He created His universe
with three books (Sepharim),
with text (Sepher),
with number (Sephar)
and with communication (Sippur). 

Or a little Zohar:

Rav Hamnuna Sava said, ‘We find the letters backward.   Bet
first, followed by Bet: Bereshit, In the beginning, followed by
bara, created.   Then aleph first, followed by aleph, elohim
followed by et.   The reason is: When the blessed Holy One
wished to fashion the world, all the letters were hidden away. 
For two thousand years before creating the world, the blessed Holy One contemplated them and played with them.  As He verged on creating the world, all the letters presented themselves before Him, from last to first.

Or Psalms:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
the sky proclaims His handiwork.
Day to day makes utterance,
night to night speaks out.
There is no utterance,
there are no words,
whose sound goes unheard.


These are a few of my sources, my points of departure.   From there, I invite the source text to lead me as I extend its metaphor, fill a gap in its narrative, repeat and vary its rhythm.   This is not the midrashic method exactly.  The purpose of midrash, an interpretive strategy of the rabbis, is to uncover or to reveal a meaning or a moral whose understanding will bring one closer to God.  My hope, in allowing myself to be taken wherever the trigger text leads, is to create a poem.  

When I’m lucky, I succeed.  But luck alone isn’t enough.  To nudge the poem along, I have to be determined and patient.  I have to trust some good instincts, informed by years of careful reading of good poems.  I have to resist the charm of the early draft.  A finished poem (as “finished” as I can make it) should, if it’s any good, transport or astonish a reader.  At the very least, it must offer a deeply engaging experience to the reader or listener.

The poem must draw the reader to itself.  The poem may also point away from itself and toward its source.   For those readers unfamiliar with the source, the poem must stand alone but it must be heard as a response to a voice calling out to it from another time, another text.  A reader need not know the specific biblical, liturgical, mystical, philosophical, historical, linguistic, or literary context out of which the call was uttered.  But he or she must be able to feel at once the nearness and distance of an unknown verse or phrase inviting or provoking the poem to speak.

In his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, “the oldest and most mysterious of all Kabbalistic texts,” Aryeh Kaplan notes the difference between derekh and nativ, two Hebrew words which can be translated as “path”.  Citing the Zohar, Kaplan explains, “a Derekh is a public road, a route used by all people.  A Nativ (path) . . . is a personal route, a path blazed by the individual for his personal use.  It is a hidden path, without markers or signposts, which one must discover on his own, and tread by means of his own devices.”

My poems succeed when they blaze their own path—you won’t find your Bubbe’s chicken soup here—and tread by their own devices—inheriting and inventing a way of speaking to a tradition that keeps calling upon me to respond.


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