The Invention of Influence by Peter Cole (review)

Poets, like other artists as they grow, return to the concerns that made them poets (painters, composers, and so on) in the first place. Those who are fortunate find the capacity to augment and transform their earlier selves. Those whose luck has run out, repeat themselves with ever diminishing capacity. Peter Cole is, as Tyndale characterized St. Joseph, a lucky fellow.

The first line of the first poem in Peter Cole’s first volume of poetry reads:

A way cut to the letter:

This initiatory poem is entitled Alphabet, and as befits a poet and translator of poetry, the cut of letters and words is never far from Cole’s central concerns. In the opening line of Alphabet, the cut is made palpable by the caesura, white on the page, separating the black letters that stride it side by side. Cole, in addition to his remarkable work as a poet, is the preeminent translator of Hebrew poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492, as well as poetry from the wide-ranging tradition collectively known as Kabbalah. The separation of being cut away, emblematic of birth, is central to creation stories in both Gnosticism and Kabbalah, the unknowable Divine separated out from the universe of creation, the Divine spark within each of us separated out from whence we came. One of the Kabbalistic creation stories tells that the Torah was created before the rest of creation; it is the blueprint for all there is. “A way cut” is a way of making, and the cut of the way comes from the letters themselves, charged with the endless productivity of creation. “To the letter” is just so, every tittle and dot having meaning. This is the stuff that poetry is made of.

The sources for Cole’s earlier poetry include Jewish tradition, but the American voice that I hear most prevalently, remembered and transformed, is that of A. R. Ammons, the Ammons of Corsons Inlet and Sphere: The Form of a Motion. So far as I can perceive, the echoes of Ammons disappear in the later work.

Speech’s Hedge is the first major sequence in Cole’s second book of poetry, Hymns & Qualms. Here I find glimmerings of John Hollander as precursor, an aspect of Cole’s poetry that Harold Bloom discusses in his brilliant and moving introduction to the new book. The “hedge” has several dimensions including hedging our bets, placing ourselves somewhere in between the adoration of “hymns” and the skepticism of “qualms.” But first and foremost, it is a setting apart. The first injunction in Pirkei Avot (“Sayings of the Fathers”), the most central book of rabbinic ethics and another recurrent theme in Cole’s poetry, is: “Be deliberate in judging, and raise up many disciples, and make a hedge for the Torah.” Like “a way cut,” the hedge is a separation that opens onto a bewildering range of poetic meanings. Within the sequence we read:

Words are wood for the vanished altar:Isaac the son who brings his own kindling.

The wood, now words, is cut to prepare a sacrifice: the story of Isaac is yet another recurrent source of wonder for Cole, Abraham’s son doomed to sacrifice and then saved by the intervention of God’s angel, a test for Abraham, famously reticent throughout the episode (or is his anguish suppressed, repressed?), Isaac providing the words, innocent queries to his father, not knowing what was planned, and neither father nor son knowing the reversals of fortune to come in the immediate future or through the vicissitudes of millennia.

The question of “what has been prepared,” a question that includes traces of the story of Isaac, becomes the title of a sequence in Cole’s third book of poems, Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. The sixth section of that sequence, “What Is Meant by Being,” asks a series of questions, the beginning of which I show below (the ellipses are mine).

What is meant by being bound?

As one who boards a train?

Or she whose...