Feature Friday: Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp by Aaron Tucker
In this week’s edition of Feature Friday, we are pleased to bring you an excerpt from Aaron Tucker’s second full-length collection of poems, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp. Inspired by the 1968 chess performance of avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp and composer John Cage, Irresponsible Mediums translates Duchamp’s chess games into poems using the ChessBard (an app co-created by Tucker and Jody Miller) and in the process, recreates Duchamp’s joyous approach to making art, while also generating startling computer-made poems that blend the analog and digital in strange and surprising combinations.
Two time U.S. Women’s Chess Champion Jennifer Shahade provides an introduction for the book, and she writes, “By placing poetry side by side with chess, Aaron Tucker reminds us of a not too distant past when we thought a chess-playing robot was far-fetched, and must and may have a human brain underneath it all.” Of Irresponsible Mediums, Leacock Medal winner Gary Barwin calls Aaron’s poems “beautiful gambits that, like the best chess games, delight and intrigue with their elegant and intelligent play.”
We hope you enjoy this excerpt from Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp. Happy reading!
From Irresponsible Mediums:
finger must roughly materialize metal plan!
each resistance, ground apology and
broken protection behind spooned twine
What is slimy variation?
Where is varied instruction?
configuration purposely or purposely cubes
mirror, vase quarters decomposition, highrise
solicits knight inside wish
individual therapist or staged necessity
slows chaste leaf or apocalypse
memory mirrors leaf, each chase
laboriously skins imagination, each twist
temptation
Playing White vs George Davidescu (Paris, 1924)
*
the instantaneous centre or
hour makes estimate beside permanence
L-shaped punctuation (punctuation), this drug and
twist, clutter or strand or
punctuation halves foreground beyond fall
binary texture and screen
central mimics exuberant crawl, binary
covers texture beside iron
pastoral viewpoint, vein or
veiny root
Playing Black vs Savielly Tartakower (Paris, 1929)
*
the sand interlocks finger
outside logic (logic) or vault or
that cube isolatedly casts sphere
temptation confrontationally and instantly reassembles
or always carves underneath cell
each textbook instantaneously grinds screech
some textbook and sandy sound
Liquorice must soundly consider negation!
Where is each instrumental grinder?
Likely among argument
any wasp some necessary speed
raspily or soundly lives or
pummels electricity or electric allegory
each violent
Playing White vs Savielly Tartakower (Nice, 1930)
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Order your copy of Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp here.
Credit: Julia Polyck-O’Neill
Aaron Tucker is the author of four books, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Book*hug) and the poetry collection punchlines (Mansfield Press) as well as two scholarly texts, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Popular Cinemanand Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both with Palgrave Macmillan). His current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com). In addition, he is a professor in the English department at Ryerson University. More info can be found at aarontucker.ca.
