Join Peter Cole, "one of the handful of authentic poets of his own American generation" (Harold Bloom), for a reading from his fourth collection of poetry The Invention of Influence. With Ben Lerner, Cole will discuss how his work as a poet and translator of modern and medieval Hebrew and Arabic relate, the concept of the "influence machine" at the heart of the book, and how he manages a poetry as aesthetically rich as it is intellectually rigorous. As Ben Lerner writes: "Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off—the affective range is wide and the forms restless."Peter Cole's most recent book is The Invention of Influence, which follows his remarkable collection Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. His previous volumes—Rift and Hymns & Qualms—were collected as What Is Doubled: Poems, 1981-1998 and his translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492, Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What: New & Selected Poems 1973-2005, Avraham Ben Yitzhak’s Collected Poems, and The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (forthcoming). With Adina Hoffman, he is the author of a volume of non-fiction, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. He has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry and the PEN Translation Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007 was named a MacArthur Fellow.
