Two Blind Pickpockets Playing Chess

Charles Simic on writing poems and chess:

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.

[Via here and here.] Not at all the way I've been thinking about chess on this blog, but I really like Simic's last line. There's a scrap of one of his poems that's been stuck in my head ever since I first read it [via here]:

Love Poem

Feather duster.
Birdcage made of whispers.
Tail of a black cat.

 I’m a child running
With open scissors.
My eyes are bandaged.

You are a heart pounding
In a dark forest.
The shriek from the Ferris wheel.

That’s it, bruja
With arms akimbo
Stamping your foot.

Night at the fair.
Woodwind band.
Two blind pickpockets in the crowd.

Checkmate.