Realm Sixty-Four

Kristi Maxwell

An author’s statement

About is a ravenous word; it has a way of eating up all nuances and not letting anyone else in on that feast. Ravenous about. Someone asked me, after I finished Realm Sixty-Four, “so the book’s about chess?” I responded that the book uses chess, and more specifically the strategies so well represented by chess, as an engine. If chess is a metaphor, it is also (and primarily) a game, and so it is play, but also the anxiety built into play because play involves (an)other (be that an individual or an object, imagined or real). Readers don’t need to know chess to know the poems.

Realm Sixty-Four was written over a three-year period. There was a lot of pleasure for me in constructing these poems, in experiencing their constructions that I got to be a part of—for some of the “Game” pieces (all of which take their names from actual games that beginners often study to practice and to hone their understandings of the board’s potential), the actual pieces of chess play an integral role: I set each move up on a board and imagined how it would look if it were represented by a concept, by an image, by an interaction, by a movement. The pieces, and their formations on the boards and the strategies that determine their new formations, have their own associations and allowed me to move through my own, too. Much of the “writing” of this manuscript came in the form of playing chess with my partner. In play, of course, anxiety and glee are in such dialogue, which is one of the reasons, perhaps, dialogue became a part of so many of the poems; I hope the dialogue between anxiety and glee is one in which readers will take part, will experience.

Reading, as seems to be the case for most writers of poems, coaxed much of the manuscript out. The more I read, I was continually drawn to the narratives regarding technology, represented through the Turk, the first chess-playing automaton, and extended into the late 20th century through the matches between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue. What strange wars cognition spurs. I’m also particularly interested in illusion and progress, illusion in progress, and illusion-in-progress. One book that brought many words to my computer screen is The Human Side of Chess, which draws out the dialectic between intellect and emotions that is inevitably a part of chess through its exploration of the lives of chess masters, and this urged me to engage the same dialectic in the poems—my hope is that the dialectic is maintained.

Realm Sixty-Four found its leaping-off points and leapt; I hope it, as well, enables leaping.