The great gift of Richard Chess's poetry is that it reminds us of the earthiness of language—its sounds and shapes, the way it bears the marks of history and geography. His work conveys a palpable sense of the landscape of Israel and Palestine and its beauties and horrors, both ancient and modern. In Chess's cosmology, language is more than a system of symbols; it's also sacred, supernatural, formidable. It has heft and weight. Chess's poems engage the ancient Hebraic tradition in which the true name of God cannot be spoken or written, and in his work we recover that sense of reverence, a fear and trembling before the power a word can wield. To us modern types, for whom words are often ephemeral or pixilated, this is a bracing truth to bump up against.
To read Richard Chess's poem "Kaddish" from Image #42, click here.
Richard Chess's Current Projects
"In Jewish tradition, one can find lots of stories about the Hebrew language itself. According to one midrash,
God created Hebrew and with it composed the Torah before creating the
physical universe. According to other legends, Hebrew language itself
has the power to create and destroy. Even the shapes of Hebrew letters
are meaningful. As fascinated as I am with Hebrew, I remain an English
language American-Jewish poet, but one whose days are also lived in and
out of Hebrew. Perhaps because of this, I have recently written a
number of poems that either incorporate Hebrew words in Hebrew
characters or that use transliterations of Hebrew words
in them. Some
of these poems will be included in my forthcoming third book of poetry,
tentatively titled Seventy Faces, scheduled to be published
by the University of Tampa Press either in Fall 2005 or Spring 2006. I
plan to continue my investigations into the interplay of Hebrew and
English in my work. I am also interested in continuing to develop verse
forms based on Jewish texts (biblical, Talmudic, liturgical,
kabbalistic). Finally, I hope to continue filling gaps in a variety of
Jewish texts, including Jewish prayer, writing, for instance, preludes
or postludes to traditional prayers. This remains an ongoing project:
writing poems to mark otherwise fleeting moments of time, to register
their sparks, to create of a moment a little sanctuary in time."
Biography
Richard Chess received his MA and PhD in English from the University of Florida. Since then, he has gone on to join the MFA faculty of the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is director of both the Center for Jewish Studies at UNCA and UNCA's Creative Writing Program.
He has published two books of poetry, Tekiah (University of Georgia Press 1994; University of Tampa Press
2002), and Chair in the Desert (University of Tampa Press 2000). His interest in the Jewish historical
and religious experience, a perennial subject in his poetry, has led
him to serve as a lecturer and visiting poet at various universities in
Israel. His work has appeared in several anthologies, including Telling and Remembering: A Century of American-Jewish Poetry, as well as such publications as Slate, Tampa Review, Ascent, and Kenyon Review.
He has won grants from the Blumenthal Foundation and the North Carolina
Arts Council. Concerned for the global community in which he lives,
Chess has also served as the co-chair for Writers Harvest, a benefit
reading for hunger relief. He lives in North Carolina.
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