“There’s something else in my past that I only recently realized contributed to my perseverance in writing poems, and that is my love of chess. I was taught the game in wartime Belgrade by a retired professor of astronomy when I was six years old and over the next few years became good enough to beat not just all the kids my age, but many of the grownups in the neighborhood. My first sleepless nights, I recall, were due to the games I lost and replayed in my head. Chess made me obsessive and tenacious. Already then, I could not forget each wrong move, each humiliating defeat. I adored games in which both sides are reduced to a few figures each and in which every single move is of momentous significance. Even today, when my opponent is a computer program (I call it “God”) that outwits me nine out of ten times, I’m not only in awe of its superior intelligence, but find my losses far more interesting to me than my infrequent wins. The kinds of poems I write—mostly short and requiring endless tinkering—often recall for me games of chess. They depend for their success on word and image being placed in proper order and their endings must have the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.
Of course, it is easy to say all this now. When I was eighteen years old, I had other worries. My parents had split up and I was on my own, working in an office in Chicago and attending university classes at night. Later on, in 1958, when I moved to New York, I led the same kind of life. I wrote poems and published a few of them in literary magazines, but I didn’t expect that any of that activity would amount to much. People I worked with and befriended had no inkling that I was a poet. I also painted a little and found it easier to confess that interest to a stranger. All I knew with any certainty about my poems is that they were not as good as I wanted them to be and that I was determined, for my own peace of mind, to write something I wouldn’t be embarrassed to show my literary friends. In the meantime, there were other more pressing things to attend to, like getting married, paying the rent, hanging out in bars and jazz clubs, and every night before going to bed baiting the mousetraps in my apartment on East 13th Street with peanut butter.”
How my heart sings 