Articles by Richard Chess

Two and a half miles: that’s how far my wife and I moved from a house where we had lived for twenty-one years to our new house. Over the two decades plus one year, we accumulated a lot of stuff. Now was the time to downsize. No time to read. No time for friends. No time to exercise. No time, no time for anything other than sorting, distributing, discarding, wrapping, packing, lifting, carrying. Rather than a long-lined Whitmanesque experience, my daily life felt more like a shorter, more tightly lined Dickinson poem.

In her poem “Jazz at Bradley’s,” Enid Shomer writes of “the darkness / that must be swallowed to make a song.” As we read through her latest poetry collection, we get a good sense of the darkness she has experienced in her life. She is the daughter of a cruel father. Growing up at a time when women’s roles were narrowly prescribed, she was an independent, ambitious, brilliant young woman. She has recently been living with serious health challenges. She has indeed swallowed plenty of darkness.

The Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik calls upon his bird to “Sing and tell me, my little bird, / of marvels in distant places.” It’s a bit hard for me to envision the “marvels” of Israel at the moment. Like many Jewish people, I’m distraught about Israel right now. In “To the Bird,” Bialik imagines an idealized place. It’s a “land of the sun,” a place “of wonders from where / spring springs eternal,” a “land where almonds and date palms bud.”

Fortunately, after a few weeks the acute pain began to subside. Now I am returning to another obstacle, deceptively comforting, that gets in the way of my perceiving and experiencing the Divine in the work of Her creation: familiarity. Leah Goldberg’s prayer-poem, translated from Hebrew by Annie Kantar, reminds me that I am not alone in living with a dulled awareness of the amazing gift of life itself.

When we read a poem closely, including its formal features, we may, if we are so inclined, experience the Divine in the poem’s details. If nothing else, when we read a poem closely, we encounter the brilliance of human creativity. And if that’s not a direct experience of the breath—or soul, another meaning of the word nishmat—of every living thing, the breath that the Divine breathed into each of us, I don’t know what is.

One early morning, after unloading the dishwasher, grinding beans for my wife’s coffee, and boiling water for my tea, I sunk into my usual spot—a love seat near our gas fireplace—, switched on the reading lamp, and opened Elizabeth Jacobson’s Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air. My head was filled with a fog like the thermal inversion fog I often see in the valley outside my window. I hoped one of Jacobson’s poems would, like the sun, warm the mental fog sufficiently for it to be lifted.

Born in Gaza in 1963, Nasser Rabah lives there to this day. He has published five collections of poetry and two novels. With the help of his colleague and friend Saleh Razzouk, a Syrian translator and writer in Aleppo, Philip Terman has been translating some of Rabah’s poems. The poem “14,000,” about Gazan children, was originally posted on Rabah’s Facebook page as “4,000” on December 1, 2023.

A day before the start of Yom Kippur, my friend Aviya Kushner, brilliant poet and writer, posted on her Substack a piece on the great poet Yehuda Halevi (1075 – 1141) and the relevance of his work to Yom Kippur. That’s what inspired me to read, during the few hours away from synagogue, a little Halevi. The first poem of Halevi’s I landed on is “Heal Me, Lord.”

Norman Fischer is an influential American Zen-Buddhist, a poet and writer, and a Jew. He wrote Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms after spending a week with the Trappist monks at Gethsemani Abbey, where he experienced for the first time the Christian monastic practice of daily recitation of the psalms. Troubled by “the violence, passion, and bitterness” expressed in some of the psalms but recognizing the power they held for the monks, Fischer decided to investigate the psalms by creating his own versions of some of them.

In the poem “Exile for the Sake of Redemption,” Yehoshua November dares to bring the Divine down to earth. This suggests that it is up to us as it is to God to “engage in activities that we imagine will enrich our future.” Teaching and learning are two of those activities. Poetry—writing and reading it—is another.

I’m rereading Paradise, Victoria Redel’s most recent collection of poems. Beginning with some midrashic poems, retellings of the story of the Garden of Eden, the book moves on to poems about family, childhood, adolescence, parenting, desire, aging, memory, menstruation, and more. Poems that, at a glance, don’t appear to have anything to do with paradise and the loss of paradise. Yet, on a fourth and fifth reading, I see how deeply connected some of the common experiences of, say, aging, are to the experience of being expelled from home.

Lawrence’s “The Migration Series” is painted with Casein tempera, a paint derived from milk protein. HeLevi’s poems are composed of air from the lungs, the vibration of the vocal cords, and the shaping of sounds with the mouth and throat. The voice was translated into visual form, alphabetic writing, and was initially preserved in iron gall ink written on parchment or vellum. This poem, these paintings: wonders. The might of human imagination and artistry.

In my workshop, we’ll look at the roads taken in a few poems. We’ll linger over a line and consider the many different lines that could follow it. Call the move from one line to the next a bend in the road. As I hope we’ll see, the poet or writer chose one road to follow. She could just as easily have chosen another, taking a bend that would lead to… Well, the destination remains to be discovered!

In this story by John Colman Wood, “Though the character’s body and brain no longer existed, somehow her consciousness lived on. “[S]he must tell her husband about this. He would be interested in her experience of death, for she was pretty sure, from their discussions over the years, that he thought consciousness died with the body.”

This essay isn’t political. It’s about the heart. It’s about the spirit, bruised, battered. It’s about friends, this essay. They feel agitated. They feel helpless. They are limiting their exposure to the minute-by-minute updates. They are turning off their news feeds. Or they are obsessively refreshing their screens. Fueling and refueling their rage, their fear, their despair.

Listening without thinking about what you are hearing or reading requires discipline and restraint. Whenever you find yourself thinking—agreeing or arguing, praising or scorning, composing and rehearsing your response—you need to let that go and return to what’s being said or sung, just that. But it’s difficult if not impossible to stop thinking’s chariot once its wheels start turning.

September 17, eight days before the Asheville storm, my wife and I left town. First stop, D.C. to visit our son and his partner. Next stop, New Rochelle, N.Y. to visit our daughter and her boys. Monday, September 30, the day after a “Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry” retreat for the board and staff in Manhattan: head home. Settle back just in time for the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. That was the plan.

Turning: an, if not the, essential act of Jewish life. Teshuvah, we call it. Repentance, it’s translated. “Teshuvah,” writes Rabbi Alan Lew, is “a Hebrew word that we struggle to translate. We call it repentance. We call it return. We call it a turning. It is all of these things and none of these things. It is a word that points us to the realm beyond language, the realm of pure motion and form.”

Prayer. It never fails. I take my place in the pew. I fling my tallis, my prayer shawl, over my head. It lands like a bird on my shoulders. I put on my reading glasses. I take the siddur, the prayer book, from its pocket in the back of the pew in front of me. Because I never arrive on time, I search for the place where we are in the service.

We are equal in our mortality: mother, father, me, you, bosses, employees, friends, strangers, enemies. Enemies: I have a hard time believing that anyone is an enemy. A competitor, yes. Wealthier than I am, yes. More talented than I am, yes. More accomplished than I am, yes. Smarter than I am, yes. Jealousy, envy, self-doubt: that’s what I feel when I see others this way.