Peter Cole is a man of letters in the enlightenment sense.  He is an acclaimed translator from Hebrew and Arabic, both modern and medieval.  He and his wife Adina Hoffman co-edit a small belles lettres press, Ibis Editions, which focuses on the literature of the levant.  And he is a poet of great insight and power.  It is in this last role that Mr. Cole was in our store recently, along with his longtime friend Forrest Gander, to read from his recent collection Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions, $14.95).  The book approaches issues of translation, religion, aging, and Israeli politics among many others, all with impressive grace.  I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

McNally Jackson: In the book you call yourself "a modern poet of a medieval kind" seemingly in reference to your work’s tendency to strive for truth and divinity.  In this and in other ways–their often surprising wit and sensuality, their dense layers of quotation–your own poems closely resemble the work you translated in your anthology The Dream of the Poem.  Is this a result of conscious emulation or some more complicated cross-pollination?

Peter Cole: It’s more a matter of cross-pollination, or maybe percolation is a better term at this point. The medieval Hebrew poetry of Muslim (and also Christian) Spain has given me such pleasure and nourished me so deeply that it is now an elemental part of me—informing the way I see the world and certainly my sense of what it is that poems might do. We are what we eat, literally and figuratively, and a great deal of this poetry has passed my lips in both directions and in both languages.

"Truth and divinity" makes it sound a little monkish, though I see why you’d put it that way. And you’re not wrong to. But the lines about being a "modern poet of a medieval kind" in that particular poem have more to do with a fascination and intense engagement with medieval notions of artifice in the service of essence and a kind of second-nature, or re-creation. "Strange how I’ve become a modern / poet of a medieval kind, / making poems for a different diversion, / as they point toward what’s divine." Some of that "artificial" medieval Hebrew poetry is dismissed as ornamental, a diversion, mere "entertainment" (though the word derives from a root meaning "to hold the attention," something you’d think poetry should do). Whereas I see the rhetoric of medieval poetry as doing double duty: giving, as Chaucer put it, "sentence and solace," and as it redirects our attention encoding all, or many, good things—including a capacity for wisdom, satire, and an appreciation of the sensual, as well as an exploration of what is true and how the sacred might be manifest. "What’s divine" there enfolds the quietly ironic idiomatic usage—as in "that’s divine!" So I’m also making fun of myself here for taking it all so seriously. Which of course I do.

McNJ: There is a thread of the hidden or buried in your poetry and, conversely, of exposure or discovery.  This is most notable in the title poem, which makes use of faded fragments of Hebrew text–gall ink on cloth and vellum–found in a geniza in Cairo, but is evident, I think, throughout your book. You praise "the normal/ mysticism of clear words in a row" but even your moments of great directness sometimes seem like "Five fine covers" shielding an inexpressible inner text. Do you imagine these moments of reticence and difficulty to be necessary to the subjects you describe? Is this something you see in your work at all?

PC: That’s an interesting observation, and I’m afraid my answer to your questions might also seem partly hidden and partly revealed, because this isn’t actually isn’t something I’ve given a lot of thought to. But I’ve always been drawn to pairings of that sort—the object and its edge; abstraction and figuration; hymns and qualms; home and abroad (or native and foreign); and so on. So you’re probably right, and hidden and revealed is simply another one of these doublings. It also happens to be the subject of one of my favorite essays in the history of Hebrew literature—"Revealment and Concealment," by the great modern Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik (whose book of by that title we published at Ibis).

I’m interested in the movement between all these poles and especially in the way their gravitational fields intersect—when you can’t quite tell which direction you’re heading in. So with the notion of "stumbling" in the title poem you mention and even in Joel Shapiro’s woodblock print on the book’s cover—which seems to be, at once, uplifted and falling.

The history of Jewish textual commentary would suggest that there is always more to what is before one than meets the eye and ear, and certainly I would say the same thing about life itself: what’s marvelously concrete and present is, in part, marvelous because of what has gone into it and because of what it’s next to and what links up with it in all sorts of ways. In short, I don’t try to be reticent or difficult; on the contrary—I try to be clear. But as Gertrude Stein once said, or as I think she once said: A writer should always try to make it simple, but only as simple as it really is.

McNJ: I’d like to ask about the structure of your poems. You make use of a variety of classical forms to shape your poems, always with enough plasticity that they don’t become, well, formal. Most American poets use such conventions–the villanelle, linked sonnets–sparingly now, and when they do it tends to be with a hint of irony or humor. I think we’ve come to associate seriousness with rupture, an uncontrolled confessional outpouring. You, however, are at your most controlled when discussing some of the most serious topics in the book: Palestinian displacement, for instance. What, if anything, do you think these topics gain from such treatment?

PC: Forms function as equipment or tools that help us translate raw sensation or perception into articulate expression. In this case I’d like to think that the traditional forms you mention lend the poems both perspective and an element of surprise, which in turn increase their leverage. Humor is also a part of that scheme, and the book contains rhymed couplets and taut epigrams that try to pierce the rhetorical fog surrounding these "serious" topics (though the wit is every bit as serious as the topics are).

Particularly charged content that has long frustrated comprehension sometimes stands a better chance of being apprehended not by a formal strategy that replicates its elusiveness and volatility but by one that conducts those qualities, diverting and transforming their energy. The artifice of these forms, their systems of sound in reaction with this material, helped me, initially, move beyond or around my own well-rehearsed positions on these topics, and that in turn took me to a much deeper and at once more complex and simpler sort of expression.

We like to think, in organic fashion, that form should be an extension of content. But in a no less organic way, content can also be seen as an extension of form–since the formal figures also precipitate content. So the "control" is employed to increase freedom—freedom of movement within the recalcitrant subject matter. It’s also applied to help me make sense of what so often seems like a senseless and certainly a confusing situation.

McNJ: Again in your title poem you spend time with seemingly mundane fragments of text–shopping lists, personal correspondence–that were cached along with the word of God in the Cairo geniza. Many Ibis titles also seem to be concerned with the fragment, the remainder, the trace. I’m thinking here specifically of Lost Ladino, Saraya, Qasida, Stations of Desire. What is it about such things that draws your attention?

PC: This would seem to take us back to your question about the hidden and the revealed. I’ve already mentioned the medieval Hebrew tradition of commentary, wherein the whole or essence is often best perceived and experienced by means of the part or the fragment, which is itself then cracked open and ransacked for meaning or traces of meaning. And in pre-Islamic Arabic literature, as later on, the trace of the beloved or remains of the abandoned campsite are central to the construction of value—to, that is, the composition of the poem. There’s also a Wittgensteinian dimension, of not trying to say more than can be responsibly said. All these ways of reading and understanding jibe with my experience of the world, and so they draw my attention. And of course the modernist legacy is also operative here, though I’m much more concerned with the aggregation of parts and their contribution to a larger vision than in their being indulged as the marker of a radical style, or shored against some notion of ruin. Brokenness interests me, but so does connection.

Photo by Lynn Saville