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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Book of Possibilities

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, The Book of Possibilities. When Peter Cole was 21, in the late ’70s, he had a mystical experience, though I doubt that he would ever use that word. This is more or less how he tells the story. He had just left college for the second time, and somehow parlayed his way into an apprenticeship with the poet Jack Gilbert. Gilbert was living in Greece at the time, on a small island called Paros. Think ribbon of beaches wrapped around a rocky interior, the bluest, greenest water, and then, on the slopes and by the coastline, medieval villages that appear whipped up out of egg white. In the ’60s and ’70s, you could live there for cheap, although cheap also meant barebones. Peter Cole describes living in a stone hut where he used a heavy-duty Swiss army knife to make a bed and kitchen table out of scrap wood. “There was no plumbing,” he says in one interview, “no electricity, just a primitive well, which soon went dry.” One day, Gilbert and Cole were out on the mountain for a hike. They’re talking and winding their way up, when suddenly, Cole stops in his tracks, seized by a flash, a vision, an understanding, clear as day, of what he was or should be: a Jewish poet. So this is what he did. He moved to Jerusalem, he threw himself into the study of Hebrew, began translating, was pulled into the deep end of Kabbalistic commentary and medieval Hebrew poems and Arabic poems that were written a millennium ago, in Andalusia, in that fruitful period when Andalusia was home to Jews, Arabs, and Christians. All the while, Peter Cole was writing his own poems, in English, but rooted in much older soil. And that’s the path he’s been on ever since. Even today, more than 40 years after his moment on the mountain. Here’s Peter.

Helena de Groot: Let’s go back to that beginning, you know, like, uh, when you moved to Jerusalem, what was going on in your life, you know, what were you hoping to find there, and then what happened once you were there?

Peter Cole: It was a very clear sense that my poetry, if it was gonna come at all, it was probably going to come through some sort of Jewish channel. And yet I wasn’t raised observant Jewish, I was raised in a fairly assimilated home, but I did have a Jewish education as a child. And so, Jewish texts were deep in me, and I had learned Hebrew as a kid and then for forgotten it. And so I felt I needed and wanted to explore that avenue, that literature. And I met somebody who was living in Providence, Rhode Island, working initially as a maintenance man at the Holiday Inn and then at a bookstore. And I met a fairly notorious professor of Judaic studies there who fed me books and then, and I said, “I really want to relearn Hebrew and really learn it properly,” he said, “Go to Jerusalem for the summer. They have an intensive summer language instruction class that’s the best in the world. And see what happens. You know, it’s not expensive and comes to worse, you’ll have an interesting experience. And I went there, I sort of got a room in the old city, and I had a phone number of a family friend, an Iraqi Jew who worked as a tour guide. And they said, “You should just call him, he’d be useful and helpful to you.” But of course, I wanted to explore on my own. And I think maybe my second day there, third day there, before classes started, I called him on a payphone. And he was very agitated and said, “Where are you? I’m coming right now to get you.” And it was clear something was wrong. And then he came and took me home and he said, “Your parents are gonna call you.” And that’s when I learned that my brother had been killed in a car crash a couple days before that. So that marked my entire sort of entry into relearning Hebrew and living abroad. And it was, you know, it was a very, very powerful year and made me serious quickly.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Cole: I mean, I was already probably too serious to begin with, but that, that turbocharged the whole thing. And it also, it also fed my study of Hebrew. I reimmersed myself in Hebrew with a tremendous desire, and, you know, within months I was up to reading speed and started reading medieval Hebrew. Not well, but trying to.

Helena de Groot: What did you do? I mean, did you stay, did you go back?

Peter Cole: I, when you say, “What did you do?” it’s like, everything slows down, and now I remember, what did I do. I went back for the funeral, of course, and the shiva. And, and then I sat down with my parents. We decided what to do. And they said, “If you want to go back, you should go back.”

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Peter Cole: And they understood how important it was to me. But what, what happened—that phrase, “what happened?”—is that some kind of, some sort of doubling took place in my life. It was very much a translational moment. I felt like I had been given his life. And, and his energy. And so, I, that really fueled a lot of what I did for—I think it still fuels a lot of what I do, in the best sense, in the best sense.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And I was wondering, can you tell me a little bit about, you know, who your brother was and, and if there was a sense in which, you know, there were traits that he had that you did not really have, and that you kind of leaned into once he was gone?

Peter Cole: Well, I wouldn’t say that the—we were completely different. He was totally grounded. I mean, he read a lot, but he wasn’t a literary person. He was on his way to being a farmer. I was on my way to being an egghead, a poet. So we were completely different in that sense. But we did share a room for a long time as kids, and we were just a year apart. And regardless of how similar one is or isn’t, or we were, that just runs very, very deep that, you know, shock of one day, this very vital person is very vital, and one day this person is, you know, a thousand pieces. So that, that was, that was a shock. And (PAUSES) you know, maybe you would leave it at that.

Helena de Groot: Sure. You know, as you were telling this story, I didn’t even, like I’d never thought about that, that, you know, we didn’t have cell phones, obviously. That your parents would have to go through this vague contact that they probably didn’t know at all to tell you this news days later.

Peter Cole: Yeah. You know, the whole thing of what we had and didn’t have, I have this with students all the time. Because recently my wife and I were going through our papers and I used to write letters. I have boxes and boxes of correspondence with my friends. And you would write—I would write every single day. And make the letter longer and then ship it off. Or write an aerogramme every day. And then you’d wait, you know, it would take two weeks for it to get to New York, let’s say.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Peter Cole: And they would take their time writing back or not. And then two weeks back, and yeah, just the whole different, and I, none of us had phones. We didn’t have phones in our rooms.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, of course. As a young student.

Peter Cole: Well it wasn’t even student, Israel had a—there was one phone company. It was a nationalized phone company and it, it, it took about three years to get a phone line.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Cole: So if you were sort of a transient, you weren’t gonna get a phone unless there was already one in the place.

Helena de Groot: Yes. Yes.

Peter Cole: But people would just come over to your house, and you would welcome them and they would stay. Because they had walked across town, and there was a real sort of old world feel to it all.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And so when you got the news about your brother, you said that it really made you even more serious about, you know, learning Hebrew and diving into that new place, that new culture. Like, in what way? Like, why was that where you went with all of your, your energy and your focus.

Peter Cole: You know, I think it was a principal thing first that, you stop sort of looking over your shoulder, like, okay, this is it, you’ve got this time. Do what you need to do, what you want to do, and the hell with everything else. And I just was very clear that this was the thing that that drove me. This is, this words, poetry, poetry, which was very much unformed at that point. I was still on the sort of coattails of my undergraduate years. I was one year out of college. I was basically, groping my way towards something that would become my own poetry, imitating other people serially, as well as I could. And then suddenly you’re alone, and you’re just sort of dangling there over the void in a country where you don’t know people and you’re trying to learn a new language and not speak the old language but to write in it. But meanwhile, that new language was coming in, and I just couldn’t get enough of it. And so I absorbed it with a kind of attention, and, and intensity I think that was unusual and is, became a kind of gift.

Helena de Groot: And I don’t know if you feel this too, but I feel like every language has a, like a feel, you know, a feel in your mouth, for instance,

Peter Cole: Absolutely.

Helena de Groot: you know? What’s Hebrew? What does it feel like?

Peter Cole: Well, there’s modern Hebrew, there’s medieval Hebrew, there’s medieval Hebrew from Spain, which feels very much like, or much closer to Arabic, by design.

Helena de Groot: Ah.

Peter Cole: Hebrew is, has kind of very—relative to English, I think, it’s a very elemental language. Its beauty is in its fairly simple manipulation of three-letter roots. All words tend to be in very visible and audible three-letter roots. So you can, you get a sense of language permutating all the time and roots shifting, and anagrams also become language play. It’s much more, I think, physical and elemental and palpable than it is in English. And more common, too.

Helena de Groot: So, okay, so, apologies for the really, you know, prosaic analogy, but is it kind of like a Lego kit then?

Peter Cole: In some ways. In some ways, yeah. There’s a kind of sense of building blocks. I, you know, I’ve talked about that mystical, Kabbalistic Hebrew writings about language talk about the letters as building blocks of the cosmos. And so, then three-letter, groups of three letters that form a word with some kind of suffix or prefix. Then they become like the sort of Lego constructions that can be, or, you know.

Helena de Groot: Right. Yeah, that’s something that I also found so fascinating. I mean, in your newest, you know, your latest collection, Draw Me After, you have a series of poems that are kind of little character studies almost, of each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And I actually didn’t, I mean, a while ago, I was studying the Hebrew alphabet myself, and I was learning it on, you know, with these little videos on this website, you know, and this person teaching the letters was also telling these stories. Like, they would draw it and then would say like, “Well, this looks a little bit like a man, you know, looking down,” and, you know, “This is a little bit like a little man reaching for the sky,” you know. And every letter had like a story attached to it.

So I’m just wondering what that is like as a writer then, you know, when the tiniest elements of language already come charged with all this meaning.

Peter Cole: Yeah. Well, first of all, that’s a great way to put it, that those letter poems are character studies, because after all, letters are characters.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Oh yeah.

Peter Cole: So they definitely are character studies. And the Semitic letters in all the Semitic languages have a sort of pictographic background. But that’s only one of the ways I was approaching the letters. Sometimes I would sort of push off the image. Gimel looks like a camel, but then where does that go? And of course, the Hebrew letter poems are in English, but I have the actual Hebrew letters there above the poems. So, I like this idea that the Hebrew letters will be popping up in English. You know, that the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. No, not in this tradition. The letter contains this spirit and there is no life apart from that. And that, so for a writer, that’s very powerful. I don’t experience that as paralyzing. I experience that as, it’s just electric. And it’s something, you know, yes, it’s high voltage, high risk, watch out, you, you know, you might not get across those tracks. On the other hand, if you learn how to work with them, all kinds of surprising things happen. And, so with that letter series, what I wanted to do was convey to a reader of English poetry, who knows nothing about Hebrew letters, doesn’t care about Hebrew letters, has the same relationship to Hebrew letters that I probably have to, I don’t know, Cyriliic or something, or Indian alphabets that I don’t know anything about. Can I convey something of the, the thrill that I get from just being near them. From the promise that they sort of convey to me. And so I tried. I just put myself in that place and said, I don’t really care how long it takes. If it takes me five years to get through the 22 letters, that’s fine. I’m only gonna write when I feel moved to write. And things came out. And it’s as if the letters were some kind of chemical compound that were dropped into the beaker of me—pssshhhh—and they set something off. And then I would follow out whatever that was, primarily through the vehicle of sound, which is to say, through English letters, and see where it would lead me.

Helena de Groot: Do you do you wanna get to one of the alphabet poems?

Peter Cole: Sure.

Helena de Groot: Well, I was thinking maybe the, the first one, “Aleph,” which is on page four.

Peter Cole: Yeah. Oops, some papers are falling. Maybe we can read “Vav” also would be an interesting one.

Helena de Groot: Sure.

Peter Cole: Should we start with “Vav”? Maybe that’ll be, just, it’s more surprising, because everybody does “Aleph.”

Helena de Groot: It’s good. What page is that one on?

Peter Cole: Page 25. When you said you were studying Hebrew letters trying to learn them online, and you mentioned “This letter is a man looking down,” I wondered if, if it was, if they were talking about this one, because it, in fact, it looks sort of like an index finger with the top joint bent forward a little bit.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Cole: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I can’t remember. I mean, like, I have since completely forgot. I was ambitious for a second and then, you know.

Peter Cole: I know the feeling, yeah.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Peter Cole: So it’s the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and, as I said, when I would start these poems, when there was a kind of critical mass of built up pressure in me and felt that now was the time to write, I really didn’t know what it was, you know, I never know what these poems are gonna be about. And I certainly didn’t know that it was gonna end up being a poem dedicated to Geoffrey Hartman, who was one of the great critics, literary critics of the second half of the 20th century, especially a Wordsworth critic, somebody that I knew here just a little bit toward the end of his life. So this became “VAV” for Geoffrey Hartman in memoriam.

Peter Cole:

(READS POEM)

This upright letter

bows its head

ever so slightly

out of humility

(much like Geoffrey)

toward the page

it’s fixed itself

to as though

by a hook

or being hooked

really a summoning

from within

it or him

to listen hard

to what’s barely

there and maybe

not-quite yet

between the lines

to sit taking

a stand and read

learning and straightness

and when to bend

so we come

not to the End—

but once again

and again to And

Helena de Groot: That is—okay, I’m happy that you picked this one. I was wrong. This is great.

Peter Cole: No, you weren’t wrong, I’m sorry, I realized halfway through, ah, Helena probably has questions about “Aleph”, but. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: No! I can ask questions about anything, thank God.

Peter Cole: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: You know what I love about this poem is, you know, that you write, “it’s fixed itself / to as though / by a hook / or being hooked / really a summoning / from within.” And I, I love that idea that a letter can do this hooking or this summoning. And you know, I wanna call back to something that you said earlier. You said that contrary to, you know, how this works for Christians, that for Jews, that the word is the spirit. You know, there is not some kind of transcendental realm beyond the word, you know?

Peter Cole: Or the letter.

Helena de Groot: The letter, right.

Peter Cole: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: So can you, I mean, I don’t know how familiar everyone listening is with that concept, but like, if the spirit is in the letter, you know, then I can imagine that of course the letter is infinitely summoning. And so again, you know, like how do you experience—and I, I don’t wanna know, I mean, I know you once said like, “Oh God, I get the bejesus from these questions about what I believe, you know, it’s too personal.” I’m not interested in that. I just wanna know, beyond the religious part, like, how do you feel summoned by letters? Or words or whatever, you know, the word, let’s say.

Peter Cole: Well also, it’s a kind of Jewish, almost cliché, one of those clichés that’s a cliché because it’s true—

Helena de Groot: Hah.

Peter Cole: See what Jews do, not what they say they believe. So what I do is I listen to—I love listening to what words are telling me to do and where they’re leading me. I love the physicality of words. Not in such a way that I don’t care about what they’re saying, I don’t care about meaning. Obviously, I do, very, very much so. But I feel that a great deal of what words have to tell us and what letters have to tell us, and sentences and lines and musical phrases in poems comes from the activation of the material. Of the medium itself. That’s what a lot of this book is really about. Draw Me After, the title is from the “Song of Songs.” And in the “Song of Songs,” the female beloved—or they’re both beloved lovers—hears the male outside, doesn’t yet know anything about this person, just this presence and says, “Draw me after you, let us run.” And so it’s this kind of, you know, call to promised eros. I mean, it’s already, the erotic charge is there. And, but the epigraph to the book takes that to another level. And it comes from the Kabbalistic scripture, the basically the Kabbalistic scripture, The Zohar. And it says, well, what’s really going on in that scene? The love story, that’s just, that’s a narrative, what’s really going on is that inside the words, there’s meaning that’s much, much deeper, right? The life is, the spirit is in the letter. We need to break open those letters and see what’s really going on. What are the other sort of, what are the hidden ways, hidden meanings in there. And so, what the rabbis in this Zohar say is that this actually refers to a scene 3,000 years or 2,000 years before the creation of the world, when all that existed were God, the 22 Hebrew letters, male and female. The letters are male and female. And these 10 channels of, of influence, sort of Pythagorean kind of channels of power, divine power. And it says that the male and female letters called out to each other, “Draw me after you, let us run.”

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Peter Cole: Which is—now, so you ask like, what does that do for a poet? That does a lot for this poet!

Helena de Groot: I mean, (LAUGHS)

Peter Cole: (LAUGHS) Yeah. That’s a pretty good start, you know? And what is Geoffrey? Geoffrey was a master reader of master writer Wordsworth, who was a master reader of landscapes and interior life. And Geoffrey could, would sit down and see things in a Wordsworth poem that other people didn’t see. And so you would wonder, were they actually there before he’d see them?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Cole: Did he create them? But of course, that’s the letters giving birth to meaning.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Cole: So the letters giving, you know, exuding a certain spirit, let’s say.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Peter Cole: So that’s what I believe. That’s what I do, and that’s what I believe. The older I get, I’m a little more, little more willing to talk about some of these in religious context, mostly because I’m referring so much to religious texts more and more. But these are sources of sustained meaning for me, for years and years and years, both in terms of, let’s say my inner life, which is to do with my outer life in relation to other people, but also as a poet, in relation to the poetry I write, the poetry I read, the, the audiences I speak to, the way I think about other people’s poetry.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I mean, I was also wondering about that, you know, as you have spent decades of your life immersing yourself in medieval poetry, medieval Hebrew poetry, you know, of which so much is kind of—I mean, there’s other stuff. There’s stuff about love and wine. There’s a lot of wine. But there, you know, a lot of these poems are about God and the writer’s relationship to God. And I was wondering, you know, do you feel like they kind of pulled you deeper into a relationship with God that you maybe from the outset didn’t have or didn’t have to that extent?

Peter Cole: The simple answer is yes.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Cole: As much as it horrifies me to say I have a relationship with God, because I don’t know what the word—in English, I don’t know what the word God means. I think I’ve gone on record as saying I don’t believe in God in the sense of like, I don’t know what the truth value of that statement in English has no, I don’t know, it’s just an opaque word for me. But when I’m translating or reading these medieval poems in Arabic, also, I, I believe those poems. Also, the thing with the medieval stuff is that there are a lot of poems about God, because let’s say half of that literature is explicitly written for the synagogue as part of the service.

Helena de Groot: Oh.

Peter Cole: So obviously that’s gonna be about God. But the other half, as you noted, is not about—necessarily about God at all. And in fact it can be about making fun of people who say things about God that are so patently hypocritical. Or it could be about, as you say, the sensuousness of wine drinking and music and imminent or developing eros. The whole really, the whole range of human experience is there that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with God. I’m teaching this stuff now at Yale in a class on Hebrew poetry from Muslim Spain, so it’s like 10th through 12th century. And we’re in the second week now. And so the, you know, very bright students obviously, but everybody makes the same mistake of, whenever I teach this, at the beginning, they’re always looking for God everywhere. And so I told ’em last class, I said, “Look, at the beginning at least, if you think the poem is about God, just stop yourself and look for, look somewhere else for meaning. It’s probably—at this stage in the class, I’m telling you, it’s probably not about God.”

Helena de Groot: That’s so interesting.

Peter Cole: “Get used to it that they’re writing about other things.”

Helena de Groot: So what you’re saying is, is it like, you know, they use these words or this language that, you know, has some God stuff in it, because that was just the language of the time, but really, that was just how they talked about anything?

Peter Cole: Well, no, there’s that, there’s that, too. But the fact is that they really are writing about going to a party and, and seeing somebody really striking and wanting to get closer, and, and the effects of the wine, or, about having an enemy who stole one of your poems and you’re gonna, you’re gonna get back at him and make him suffer. Or being at war. Because some of them were involved in battles in Andalusia. Or fleeing a city, becoming a refugee. So that’s what I mean, it’s, God might sneak in there, make a cameo appearance, someone says, you know, “By God, I’ll get that guy.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Cole: But that’s not piety in the, in the sense that,

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Peter Cole: That’s what I always have to caution against is like, these are real people with real temperaments. And that was, that was a shock for me when I encountered it. And in a way, the lesson for me as a writer is, I write about these things, but I try never to—I try to ground them. I try to make it, make them part of the fabric of my daily life, and I try not to use those big words. Wallace Stevens has got this line that I have sort of tattooed to the inside of my forehead: “Say what it is that you see in the dark, that it is that, or that it is this, but do not use the rotted names.” That’s from “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” Yeah, that’s an amazing—and so I try not to use the rotted names, but I try to write, or I find myself wanting to write about the things that those names point to. So, this kind of a deep translation.

Helena de Groot: I really love this so much. I mean, I had this teacher of translation at some point, and she said, “Really, the horizon that you are working towards is you want to give the reader of your translation an experience that feels similar to the experience that the reader of the original has. That’s the horizon that you’re working towards.” But that was just when I was translating Russian. Contemporary Russian, you know, I mean, some of these texts were 19th century, but that’s not, still not terribly far away. Whereas what you are doing is you’re taking texts that are a thousand or many thousands years old and you’re trying to render them in contemporary English. So how, how much do you get into the world, you know, the day-to-day of people then, to try and make something that is equivalent?

Peter Cole: I want to know as much as possible about everything. I wanna know the—Rosemarie Waldrop has a wonderful essay about translating, she quotes Gadamer about the third dimen—what is the unit of translation? Is it the word? That’s what, you know, people used to think. No. Is it the phrase? Is it the entire work? Or is it the entire universe or larger context that the original work existed in, and therefore the context that your translation will exist in. I mean, which is a beautiful thing, because then you’re really into the ultimate kind of ripple out relationship of everything to everything. And so, I wanna know as much about that ambient dimension of whatever it is I’m writing as possible, whether it’s an old thousand-year-old text, 2000-year-old text, or a drawing that somebody did last year, and I’m “translating” it. So I think the principle’s the same, but, too, when you’re dealing with older, the older kind of texts you asked about, the medieval texts, it’s a lot harder to get back to a plausible sense of what life might have been like. And of course you’re imagining it. Translating older work like that is fiction. It’s fiction. You know, you are, you’re making a plausible fiction. And part of the plausible fiction is that we’re gonna think of it as fact.

Helena de Groot: I love, I love the admission, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I was hoping if we could read, you know, one or maybe two of these really old, old poems. I’d been reading through your anthology, The Dream of the Poem. So it’s all translations from this, you know, medieval Andalusia really, right?

Peter Cole: Right.

Helena de Groot: Like, you know, where Arabs and Christians and Jews all lived together and kind of cross pollinated and all that. And well also, when I looked at the dates, like the Middle Ages basically in Spain, you know, and it’s something like 1,016 years, which is, it’s just an unimaginable stretch of time. Like if we would transpose it to today, we would start today, the period would end somewhere in the year 3040-something. (LAUGHS) I mean, it’s just unimaginable, you know?

Peter Cole: Well, on the Hebrew side, the period is a little shorter, so.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Peter Cole: But it’s still 500 years.

Helena de Groot: Right. So, okay, so, you know, when I ask you, “Can you describe what you have found out about this world?”, obviously you pick, you know, what stretch of that world you wanna talk about. But you know, maybe to bring it in context to the poem, so the poem that I was thinking about—or the two poems, they’re both by, I’m gonna mispronounce his name, Shmuel

Peter Cole: HaNagid?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Cole: HaNagid, yeah.

Helena de Groot: Can you tell me a little bit about the world that he was from, about him and about his world?

Peter Cole: So he was one of the people I had in mind when we were just talking about those poems and the wine and the military campaigns. And he was, he’s almost, as a character, too good to be true or true good to believe that he actually existed, because he rose—at least sort of legend has it that he rose from poverty as a refugee through the discovery of his skills as a letter writer. He would, you know, you still find that in, in Middle Eastern countries, you still see in Jerusalem there are a lot of people who can’t write. And so you have people who are available. In Jerusalem there used to be signs, you know, “Shoemaker and letter writer.” The guy is a shoemaker and he also will write letters for you, you know. And HaNagid was famous because his letters eventually made it into the court at Malaga, where he was a refugee, and impressed people at the court so much that he was brought into the court. And he eventually became the head of Andalusian jury and the prime minister of the Muslim city state of Grenada, and the commander-in-chief of its army.

Helena de Groot: Wow. Oh, okay! Wow. Speaking of Renaissance men, I mean, you know, Renaissance men in the Middle Ages, but.

Peter Cole: He did other things too, we have to leave the other things out because otherwise our microphones will explode,

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING)

Peter Cole: but he wrote about everything. All the subjects I mentioned. Yes, he was also an expert in religious law, but that didn’t stop him from all the, doing all these other things.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. (LAUGHS) Can you imagine being like the head of the army and a scholar on religious law?

Peter Cole: Well, I say the, he’s sort of like the Henry Kissinger of his day,

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Oh, God.

Peter Cole: which just turns it all into a joke. Yeah. But there is a sense of like, he had that kind of power. And tremendous learning. But also he’s widely admired by, for the most part, his, let’s say by his Muslim contemporaries and peers. They are also fights, and this wasn’t all a utopia. There was real rivalry. But he obviously had, for lack of a better term, people skills. He was a good ruler. He ruled for a long, long time. He was a good commander of the army. Again, he’s a commander of a Muslim army, so it’s, he’s, in many ways, he is a one off character. But he would, he could write poems, like let’s just, pick, (FLIPPING PAGES) “The Multiple Troubles of Man.”

Helena de Groot: That’s exactly the one I picked! Okay!

Peter Cole: Okay. All right.

(READS POEM)

The multiple troubles of man,

my brother, like slander and pain,

amaze you? Consider the heart

which holds them all

in strangeness, and doesn’t break.

Helena de Groot: (EXHALES)

Peter Cole: That’s a bit like Nietzche saying that the thought of suicide gets you through many a sleepless night.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Cole: You know? That poem has gotten me through some pretty rough, rough moments.

Helena de Groot: Right, right.

Peter Cole: And that’s, so that’s an epigrammatic poem that—he’s got I think 2000 epigrams, wisdom literature based on the one hand, modeled after the Book of Proverbs, but on the other hand, very much modeled after Arabic poetry.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Peter Cole: All of this stuff is modeled heavily on Arabic poetry. Written with the biblical vocabulary, but all the genres are taken largely from Arabic. And for all we know, this could be a translation from Persian to Arabic to Hebrew, that doesn’t matter. What matters is the animating touch. It comes alive. And the, you know, let’s say, let’s say it comes alive in English. That’s part of that whole tradition. Doesn’t matter where it comes from. The ideas of originality are very, very different. Ostensibly, this comes from wisdom.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Peter Cole: And wisdom doesn’t have borders and doesn’t have nationalities, and, but it has to be completely animated within each language that it sort of finds itself.

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if we can get to another poem, I mean, I love this author, I’m sorry I’m ignoring everyone else in the book, but,

Peter Cole: He’s an amazing character. An amazing character.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I was wondering if we can

Peter Cole: My father

Helena de Groot: Oh, sorry.

Peter Cole: Not to brag, but to just show you how ridiculous this whole thing is. My father was a, blessed memory, was a kind of very civic-minded lawyer who was a lifelong boy scout. Boy scouts was one of his big things. And he would always go off as a, you know, man in his sixties and seventies, these boy scout jamborees and things like that. I wouldn’t be caught anywhere near such a thing.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Peter Cole: He would read, he would stand up in front of, you know, 3,000 boy scouts and read them a Shmuel HaNagid poem. Yeah. And he did not like poetry and he didn’t have a clue what I was up to.

Helena de Groot: What?

Peter Cole: But I would, yeah, when I heard that, I just thought, okay, that’s some kind of strange victory. I don’t know what it, is, but.

Helena de Groot: Absolutely. No, absolutely. I think if a poem can convince

Peter Cole: Or else these poems are a lot worse than I thought they were.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I mean, they are so vivid. I already told you that. But there was this one poem where I just had to pinch myself. Like I, because, you know, I first read that one. It’s called “The Market.”

Peter Cole: That’s an amazing poem.

Helena de Groot: It’s amazing. I first read it in your book, it’s a book New and Selected, which has translations and your own poems.

Peter Cole:Hymns and Qualms.

Helena de Groot: You know, it’s called Hymns and Qualms. And you know, you only at the end of each poem in very sort of subtle grayish kind of font, you put, you know, like, nothing if you wrote it or you put, you know, “By whatever,” you know, this author from that century. And so when I read that poem, I thought that was you. You know, walking through contemporary Jerusalem and writing what you saw.

Peter Cole: Good. That’s what I wanted.

Helena de Groot: And, so then it was, can you remind me from what century?

Peter Cole: 11th century.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Great.

Peter Cole: That’s, that’s literature. Ezra Pounds and E.M. Forster, lots of people, and the rabbis talk about, you know, there’s no—the rabbis say there’s no earlier or later in the Torah. It’s all happening at the same time. And Pound said “All ages are contemporaneous.” And E.M. Forster has this thing of, what is literature? It’s writers of all ages sitting in like, a big reading room, like at the British Library.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Peter Cole: And in writer’s minds that is, that is what’s happening.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Cole: So yeah, this is a poem that I, I’ve read it all over the world, and you don’t have to say anything about the 11th century, you can just read it, but it’s even wilder when you think of it as being the 11th century.

(READS POEM)

The Market

I crossed through a market where butchers

hung oxen and sheep side by side—

there were birds and herds of fatlings like squid,

their terror loud

as blood congealed over blood

and slaughterers’ knives opened veins.

In booths alongside them the fishmongers,

and fish in heaps, and tackle like sand;

and beside them the Street of the Bakers,

whose ovens are fired through dawn.

They bake, they eat, they lead their prey;

they split what’s left to bring home.

*

And my heart understood how it happened and asked:

Who are you to survive?

What separates you from these beasts,

which were born and knew waking and labor and rest?

If they hadn’t been given by God for your meals,

they’d be free.

If he wanted this instant

he’d easily put you in their place.

They’ve breath, like you, and hearts,

which scatter them over the earth;

there was never a time when the living didn’t die,

nor the young that they bear not give birth.

Pay attention to this, you pure ones,

and princes so calm in your fame,

know if you’d fathom the worlds of the hidden:

THIS IS THE WHOLE OF MAN.

Peter Cole: So that, the end of that poem, for example, is from Ecclesiastes.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Peter Cole: But in Ecclesiastes, when it says, “This is the whole of man,” it’s referring to the Torah, the law. But it’s a tacked on verse at the end that people think were tacked on for sort of moral reasons of propriety. But he turns it and he says no, you know, he’s using it in a much, much freer way. This market scene, that’s the whole of man.

Helena de Groot: I mean, it’s in incre—you know, what also was kind of depressing and riveting about these very old poems is that apparently we human beings need to be told the same lessons over and over and over again, right? (LAUGHS) Like, you know, this, this,

Peter Cole: I certainly do.

Helena de Groot: Right, yeah, same! But like also every generation, you know, like we never learned that, you know, the accident of birth is just that, you know, you could have been born as a beast brought to slaughter, or you could have been born as the butcher.

Peter Cole: That’s actually, to me, that’s not necessarily a depressing thing because there’s something beautiful about that. These, the same things sustain us that sustained other people too.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: I was wondering if we can really change course here and talk about Palestine, because you know, I was reading this essay that you wrote 10 years ago, and in this essay you describe sitting on a park bench in New Haven. And you know, while you’re sitting there looking around, you’re thinking about, you know, your imminent return to Israel. And you describe the place in this essay as being “in moral collapse.” Now, as you know, of course, things haven’t exactly improved since then. I mean, they just elected the most right wing government in the history of the country, and immediately the violence towards Palestinians has exploded again. So, you know, because this is so far from this world that you like to immerse yourself in, you know, this world of cross pollination and cohabitation of, you know, medieval Andalusia, how do you, how do you live with those two visions almost of what’s possible and of what’s not contradicting each other?

Peter Cole: Yeah. By spending five and a half months a year in New Haven.

Helena de Groot: Ha. (LAUGHS)

Peter Cole: (LAUGHS) Well, first of all, the Andalusian, what’s important to keep in mind about the Andalusian period is that it also had its serious ups and downs and eventually collapsed. Over, after a period of 150 years, the political situation changed. So, the sort of Andalusian model at its best is an idea. It was a reality, too, and it’s an idea that I think, I do think is a valid idea. And it remains as valid as it ever was. And some people would say it never was valid, it’s delusional.

Helena de Groot: Hmm.

Peter Cole: And that’s basically the discussion in Israel Palestine is, is any kind of coexistence, let alone a fertile, generative, mutually enhancing, coexistence possible? The people in charge certainly on the Israeli side right now would say, “No, it’s delusional and destructive.” And then there’s certainly people on the Palestinian side who would say the same thing. Maybe fewer people, but enough people. So, how do I live with that? Painfully. It’s, it makes me sick. What goes on every day, mostly in Palestine and the West Bank, Gaza, but generally in, let’s just call it Israel Palestine, most Americans, if they, if they were faced with it, if they were, they just wouldn’t believe it. They wouldn’t believe the kind of coarseness and cruelty and really kind of barbarousness that takes place under Israeli law or military law. That’s the thing, it’s actually military law. And in the name of a lot of things, and I speak as a very proud Jew and all that, but in the name of Judeo-Christian values and American tax dollars, and it’s just, it’s unbelievable. And I don’t spend that much time there, but I have friends who are there all the time just trying to bear a kind of Ghandian witness, nonviolent witness, to what’s going on and protect the crops or land of Palestinians who are having land confiscated all the time. And the level of humiliation and the number of also deaths, it’s been steady. So now everybody’s up in arms, as it were. And horrified by this new right wing government and in fact by all the deaths now in the last week. But this has been going on for a long time. There’s nothing surprising about this. Is it more horrible because right now more people are being killed and Israeli troops are going into villages in the middle of the night and enforcing collective punishment, or Jews are walking out of synagogues and being gunned down? But it’s the same problem that’s been around for a long time. Today, while I was shaving, I was thinking, Jews have been able to do such amazing things, you know, come up with all kinds of inventions and, and they can spy. Israelis, you know, they might be right inside your headphone right now.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Peter Cole: Yeah. And they’re great at it. They’re amazing. And they can’t figure out how to just kind of try to make something sustainable and human and economically viable work?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Peter Cole: That’s insane. To me, that’s insane. I used to live with it more by doing a certain kind of literary activism, which is much harder to do these days for all kinds of reasons and normalization, and

Helena de Groot: Oh, interesting.

Peter Cole: But in my way, I try to, through teaching, through writing, pointing the direction through poems here and there, I don’t know that, you know, it just, these are all small acts of a nonviolent resistance and redirection of attention, and that’s, I think all you can do.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, I mean, it just struck me because like, all of your work, you know, for the past, you know, I don’t know, maybe half a century is slightly overstating it, but something like that, you know, is, is really celebrating the other thing, you know? Is really celebrating all the ways in which human beings sort of come together and yeah, sure, there’s friction and all that, you know, but that we’re essentially curious about one another and learning from each other and creating because of one another. And I just wonder, you know, as such a kind of translator, again, of Judaica into English, right, if you feel in a way like you wanna explain almost. Like, yeah, but this is not what Judaism is or has to be, you know what I mean? Like it’s, this is not the Judaism I know, you know, do you ever feel kind of it’s your role,

Peter Cole: Well, I do, but that is, part of it is the Judaism. That’s the thing is we have to, we have to acknowledge that that is there in Judaism. Or let’s say in the history of Jewish civilization. Judaism, I mean, was the Bible Judaism? Not really. That was pre-Judaism in many ways. But, and I think of the Bible as a kind of, sort of i-Ching. It’s a book of possibilities. The worst things are in there so that you will know that they are in you possibly and they’re around you. And it’s not, it’s not a book of, oh, this is the best way to live. It’s not a book of prescriptions. It’s a book of possibilities and a book of, more of a book of questions in that way. But Judaism contains the seed of some horrible things. So does the history of Christianity. So does pretty much every religion, and probably most non-religions, too. I mean, getting rid of religion doesn’t make people necessarily any kinder. But there is a way, of course, for my own wellbeing, and mental health, let’s say, in which I need to continually find the, find the rich and deeply human aspects of a culture that is, right now, being hijacked by an extreme element, let’s say, or by a sensibility and temperament and ideology that I find repulsive. And I know that other poets are, they’re, in Israel, this is a real problem. What happens when the vocabulary of—both historical vocabulary and vocabulary of, let’s say, inner life, which has come up through the Bible, and religious texts, by and large, has been poisoned. That’s a big issue for people who are writing in Hebrew. And I think it’s a big issue for anybody who’s dealing with this material, period. So, yeah, there is, if anything, I’m rescuing it for myself, just for my own sanity and survival.

Helena de Groot: I was thinking of maybe giving the last word to a Palestinian poet.

Peter Cole: Taha Muhammad Ali?

Helena de Groot: Yes, exactly, exactly him. I was thinking of that poem “Twigs.” It’s on page 244 in Hymns and Qualms.

Peter Cole: 244. Yeah. So this is by Taha Muhammad Ali, a Palestinian poet who was born in the village of Saffuriyya, which itself has a whole layered history, was the town where the Mishnah, the book of Jewish law was codified. He was born in the 1930s, and that village at that point was pretty much like a 19th or 18th century village in terms of his development. And he grew up entirely in a peasant culture. Had two or three years of formal schooling, was totally self-taught. Became a—in 1948, the village was bombed and people fled the village, and he, like a lot of the people from the village, fled to Lebanon. And then he came back illegally into the new state of Israel the following year and settled in Nazareth, which is very close to Saffuriyya. And he lived his entire adult life in Nazareth, near the Church of the Annunciation. First he had a grocery store, then he owned a souvenir shop. And he had a souvenir shop his entire life and wrote poetry on the side. Taught himself English, taught himself the classical Arabic tradition, and was an amazing, amazing guy.

(READS POEM)

Twigs

Neither music

Fame, nor wealth,

not even poetry itself,

could provide consolation

for life’s brevity,

or the fact that King Lear

is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,

and for the thought that one might suffer greatly

on account of a rebellious child.

*

And so

it has taken me

all of sixty years

to understand

that water is the finest drink,

and bread the most delicious food,

and that art is worthless

unless it plants

a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.

*

After we die,

and the weary heart

has lowered its final eyelid

on all that we’ve done,

and on all that we’ve dreamt of,

all we’ve desired

or felt,

hate will be

the first thing

to putrefy

within us.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Peter Cole is the author of eight poetry collections, including Hymns and Qualms, The Invention of Influence, and his latest, Draw Me After. And he published more translations than I can mention, including an anthology of Medieval verse from Andalusia, titled The Dream of the Poem. And together with his wife, Adina Hoffman, he wrote an investigative literary travelog about the discovery of a long-forgotten sort of storage room with hundreds of thousands of scraps of sacred and secular medieval Jewish texts. That book is titled Sacred Trash. Peter Cole is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, an NEA and NEH Fellow. He was awarded a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and a PEN Translation Fund Grant, as well as the TLS Translation Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and our very own Poetry Magazine’s John Frederick Nims Prize. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, where he teaches at Yale. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

(MUSIC PLAYS AND FADES OUT)