Chess and Poetry: May They Teach Us How to Learn : No Tokens

^*Interviews — July 23, 2020

Nkosi Nkululeko — Chess and Poetry: May They Teach Us How to Learn

Nkosi Nkululeko is a brilliant poet and polymath. We here at No Tokens have been celebrating and revisiting his work since featuring his poem in Issue 4 when we also got to hear him light up the room reading at our Center for Fiction launch party. His passion for poetry led us to his passion for Chess. We spoke over email these past few weeks on writing and the importance of questioning (in terms of whose logic, whose systems), how beautiful “bad” games can be, and the ways we can be making and rebuilding right now. We love that there is still much to learn about a game that’s been played for 1,500 years, and the profound possibility in decoding archetypes of power. We’ll leave you with the beauty and simplicity of how Nkosi describes games and poetry: “they teach me how to learn.”

No Tokens: Who taught you Chess? How old were you?

Nkosi Nkululeko: My mother introduced me to Chess when I was 3 years old. To this day, it’s one of the most vivid memories I hold dear; her explaining the names of each piece and their abilities. It wasn’t until a few years later that I learned and practiced other aspects of the game with my brothers, father, and family friends who indulged my growing obsession. But even as a child I developed a stubbornness to certain pedagogical methods in both academic and creative spaces. In Chess, I hardly had any difficulties with learning with more experienced players, whether they were adults or children but I had already developed a love for studying in solitude. That practice started fairly early and probably affected my relationship with social structures that I wasn’t always excited to participate in. Studying Chess the way I did, I believe, was the reason I distanced myself from the world. Poetry, I think, is pulling me back in it.

NT: It’s fascinating to think about the practices that require solitude – that bring us into our own company – alongside the activities or social structures that draw us out. I love that idea of poetry pulling you back in (to the world.) For you, is it more the actual community around poetry, or the act of writing itself that brings to mind community, poetic lineage, other voices?

“Whenever I play, I try to use the theory I’ve learned and disregard it simultaneously. Grandmaster Levon Aronian said in an interview, “to play Chess without wanting” is important. I think Chess teaches us to not limit ourselves to only the ideologies that were born in the past, but to collaborate or edit them with newer modes of thought.”

NN: Both! I love going to poetry readings! A lot! I love podcasts (Commonplace, VS, The Poetry Salon, just to name a few)! I love lectures, folks rambling (sometimes), and geeking out over a subject! I’m sure others have a different view but I became obsessed with Chess because of its relationship with the past, the dead. Biographies, essays, films, art, any medium that dealt with the history of Chess, I consumed. Anything I could afford. Like I said before, that transferred into my life of poetry, but what I am constantly realizing is the beauty of sitting in a park eating food and chatting about poems. As I’m learning how to be part of the world, I’m learning that a poem is not a poem if it’s a good one. It’s everything else you feel both in and outside of the body, of the mind. And sometimes that poeticism represents itself in walking in the woods, getting my ass whooped in a video game, or cooking food with someone, feeding them (both the food and the ass whoopin).

NT: That’s brilliant! What can the history of Chess teach us?

NN: As technology improves with Chess engines, AI’s, or opening theory, we realize just how little we know about Chess. Whenever I play, I try to use the theory I’ve learned and disregard it simultaneously. Grandmaster Levon Aronian said in an interview, “to play Chess without wanting” is important. I think Chess teaches us to not limit ourselves to only the ideologies that were born in the past, but to collaborate or edit them with newer modes of thought.

In a given moment, I’m trying to refresh what it means to give agency to each piece, to not restrict them to the hierarchical standards that the Europeanized version of Chess has established over the centuries. The pawn can be the strongest in a given position, the knight, or bishop. The rook and queen could be a liability. Maybe the king is not pulling his weight. Chess asks us to constantly update and revise how we “harmonize” our pieces.

NT: Harmonizing pieces, that’s so beautiful. And it is our responsibility to question the value and “inherent” known abilities (limits) of the archetypes around us. I like thinking about how each piece can be the most powerful in different situations. I’m wondering what’s changed in the game over the years, especially as neuroscience has revealed more and more about how the brain works.

NN: I can’t say much on the development of the game in relation to neuroscience, but I innately feel that we’re more aware of how methods and processes are subject to change depending on the position. The game hasn’t changed at all, but like you inferred, the brain is adapting to new ways of learning. Adaptability is key. Folks should check out the documentary “AlphaGo,” about the Go-playing AI that beat the world-class player Lee Sedol. I haven’t played Go as long as Chess but studying really augmented my perception of Chess, and even poetry! Adaptability, balance, connecting the “points” (both in a Go game and a conversation or poem) from their disparate locations. These are some of the elements that feel imperative to these games. They teach me how to learn.

NT: The opening of Chess is studied and explored. Is there a perfect opening in mind for your creative work?

NN: In Chess, there are so many openings you could play. So many sub-variations. I do love the Caro-Kann, though. It’s one of those openings I learned as a child. It reflects my poetry almost perfectly; the consistency of rewriting what I learned as a child.

NT: How does chess affect your thinking as a person, as a writer?

NN: In a [Kenyon Review Podcast (Ep.87)] conversation between Monica Sok and Carl Phillips, Monica recalls Carl saying “Poems are just patterned language with meaningful disruptions.” That pretty much sums up the creative “process” I’ve lived by since I was a child. I never believed I had an innate talent for Chess or writing. There was always someone I envied for their artistic fluency. For better or for worse, Chess influenced me to believe that every artistic outlet was grounded in a kind of “systematic play.”

THAT was a huge breakthrough when I took poetry more seriously. It opened the door for me to see the structural similarities between the theory of art and Chess, music and poetry, theater and psychoanalysis, everything with anything. This gave me the confidence to look past “vision” or “prodigious talent” and just pay attention to patterns that resonate in (at least) a visual and aural context. To solve a Chess puzzle, the order in which we make the moves are usually critical. But now, in poetry, I practice disorganizing the pattern to reach unique combinations.

NT: I like the idea of taking a more neutral, maybe more critical view to art or one’s “prodigious talent” in order to better understand it, or to meet it a bit more eye to eye. Do you think that element of play lowers the stakes? Or perhaps allows one to access different (maybe higher?) levels of creativity?

NN: “Systematic Play” offered me a fresh creative challenge. But in retrospect it allowed too much comfortability. I’ve been playing music since I was a kid, and knowing how to read it gave me a means to explore prosody in a different context. Playing with different systems can be difficult because so many ideas are running through my head daily on how to write a poem and I can’t comprehensively translate all of them. But I do know when I am closer to an accurate translation. It’ll never be perfect of course but I can feel it.

NT: I feel like we’re often taught to rein in our poems with patterning in order to make a system of organization. I’m so happy to hear you take a different approach to your work! Do you view reading poetry, too, as a pattern you have to pull apart a bit in order to dismantle?

NN: Yes! I love looking for patterns I can find in a poem. Depending on who you talk to you may get the feeling that a reader is listening only to how recognizable the “meaning” in a poem is. Clarity of meaning is what we strive for as writers, but I’m also interested in how we normalize our agency as readers. I love using my other obsessions as a template for how to read and write. How do we read a poem through the lens of an artist or dancer; the graceful or rigid movements of a word on the page? Or a plasterer; how one word coats another that is historically problematic? I hope we can continue the conversation about the deep interconnectedness between mediums. To be honest, I personally find certain authors to be withholding in this regard. Not to say they are required to talk about it but when exploring this topic, it appears that many are precious about how a “good” poem functions based on the lineage of poetry. They talk about the “logic” of a poem, but whose?

Chess is played with specific rules and if you want to win you have to play the game with an accurate and dogmatic approach, but do you know how beautiful “bad” games can be?? How do we learn to reframe our sense of reading so that it’s not only fitting the context of poetry?