The Invention of Influence: Peter Cole reads from his new poems

MacArthur Fellow Peter Cole has taught during Winter Term and lectured at Middlebury in the past, most recently on Jewish mystical poetry. He returns to campus to read from a new book of his own poems, The Invention of Influence (New Directions, 2014), which Booklist describes as “masterful … deeply allusive, profound, committed verse,” and which, writes Harold Bloom, “confirms [Cole’s] standing as one of the most vital poets of his generation.”

Peter Cole’s many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition (Yale), The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Princeton), and works by Aharon Shabtai, Taha Muhammad Ali, Avraham Ben Yitzhak, and Yoel Hoffmann. Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the PEN Translation Prize for Poetry, the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the Association of American Publishers’ Hawkins Award for Book of the Year, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Sponsored by the Program in Jewish Studies (Aquinnah Fund), the Department of English and American Literature and the Department of Religion