This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet and author Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
Welcome to Poetry Moment. I’m Marjorie Maddox.
October 11 is National Chess Day. “Mighty Pawns” by Major Jackson both comments on and moves far beyond the black-and-white board that serves as witness to keen intellect and cunning strategy. In one long sentence, Jackson presents this revered game as no respecter of persons. Though you might not suspect it from standing next to him at a bus stop, “Earl, the toughest kid / on [the poet’s] block in North Philadelphia… [beat] the bearded / masters at the Belgrade Chess Association.”
Major Jackson is the author of Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems and the inaugural recipient of the Patricia Cannon Willis Prize for American Poetry from Yale Library. A recipient of fellowships from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and John S. Guggenheim Foundation, he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.
You may be surprised by Jackson’s poem. From a crowded Section 8 home, a chess prodigy emerges—fierce, hungry, and angry enough to take your Queen.
Or maybe, like Earl, you have surprised others with a skill they didn’t expect, given your background. “Mighty Pawns” by Major Jackson is checkmate in a poem.
Mighty Pawns
If I told you Earl, the toughest kid
on my block in North Philadelphia,
bow-legged and ominous, could beat
any man or woman in ten moves playing white,
or that he traveled to Yugoslavia to frustrate the bearded
masters at the Belgrade Chess Association,
you'd think I was given to hyperbole,
and if, at dinnertime, I took you
into the faint light of his Section 8 home
reeking of onions, liver, and gravy,
his six little brothers fighting on a broken love-seat
for room in front of a cracked flat-screen,
one whose diaper sags it's a wonder
it hasn't fallen to his ankles,
the walls behind doors exposing the sheetrock
the perfect O of a handle, and the slats
of stairs missing where Baby-boy gets stuck
trying to ascend to a dominion foreign to you and me
with its loud timbales and drums blasting down
from the closed room of his cousin whose mother
stands on a corner on the other side of town
all times of day and night, except when her relief
check arrives at the beginning of the month,
you'd get a better picture of Earl's ferocity
after-school on the board in Mr. Sherman's class,
but not necessarily when he stands near you
at a downtown bus-stop in a jacket a size too
small, hunching his shoulders around his ears,
as you imagine the checkered squares of his poverty
and anger, and pray he does not turn his precise gaze
too long in your direction for fear he blames
you and proceeds to take your Queen.
That was “Mighty Pawns” by Major Jackson.
Copyright Credit: Major Jackson, "Might Pawns" from Roll Deep. Copyright © 2015 by Major Jackson. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Source: Roll Deep (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2015)
Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox, Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can view more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment. [radio.wpsu.org]
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
