Interview with Peter Cole
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Peter Cole is an American poet living in Jerusalem. His most recent book of poems is Hymns & Qualms from Sheep Meadow Press. He's also a translator from Hebrew. Recent translations include Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid , Love & Selected Poems of Aharon Shabtai , and, From Island to Island: Poems by Harold Schimmel . Peter Cole is also the publisher and editor of Ibis Editions, based in Jerusalem, a literary press that publishes Arabic, Hebrew, and literary work from other languages in English translation. The original interview was done over the phone for the radio program Cross-Cultural Poetics, on KAOS 89.3FM Olympia.
- Leonard Schwartz
LS: Peter, you are an American living in Israel. How long have you been living in Jerusalem, and what led you to move there?
PC: I am, indeed, an American. Actually, I have dual citizenship, Israeli and American, but I tend to think of myself as American in all respects. If anything, as far as Israel goes, I think in terms of being a citizen of Jerusalem rather than of the country as a whole. But that's another story. I came to Israel for the first extended stay in 1980, so it's been on and off over twenty years, more on than off, and I think of Jerusalem as home.
LS: What you say about Jerusalem, we used to feel that way about New York. We were citizens of New York City, and, well, also America. Now I'm living here in Olympia so it must be some kind of goofy exile. Since moving to Jerusalem, you've started up Ibis Editions, which is, in my mind, one of the most exciting and important literary publishing ventures going. Can you say a little bit about Ibis Editions, how it started, and what you're doing with it?
PC: Sure. I might backtrack a little into the second part of your question since it actually leads into the founding of Ibis, and explains why I came here originally. People who move to Israel, certainly from the United States, though from Europe as well, tend to be driven by ideology. That wasn't my situation. I came because I had a sense that my own poetry was going to come out of a Hebrew tradition, and that, in order to really explore that fully and properly, I had to learn Hebrew, and to learn Hebrew I had to come here. So, while I realize it sounds somewhat naïve, I came in pursuit of that whole imaginative tradition. But I've also liked living here very much and enjoyed rich friendships in the literary community. Over the years, I was exposed to a lot of work that I thought English readers should know about. Various friends who visited from the U.S. suggested that I try to make that work available: through translation, by starting a press, or by putting together an anthology. So we had been batting this idea of starting a press around for a long time. Then, in the late nineties, somebody came along offering to back the press, and we got off the ground with seven books by people we'd had in mind, people whose work was distinctive but overlooked. And very soon it snowballed. It grew organically into something much larger, certainly much more time-consuming, but also much more ambitious than what we originally had in mind. That also had to do with the way the political and cultural situation here changed over time. When we started, Israel was in its post-Oslo phase. I wouldn't say that the atmosphere was euphoric, but things were looking better than they had in a good long while, and there was very definitely optimism and openness in the air. By the time we got ourselves together to publish the first round of books in 1998, things were not nearly as good. So Ibis turned into something quite different from what we started out with, but we're very pleased with the direction it's taken.
LS: I'm certainly struck by the kinds of juxtapositions you're able to produce. As you know, I recently wrote an article in the Denver Quarterly on some of the books that you've been publishing. The threesome was a new translation of the 13th century Arabic poet, Ibn Arabi, of course translated from the Arabic, twentieth century Jewish scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, who it turns out was a poet, and you've published his poems translated from German into English. And then a contemporary Palestinian poet, Taha Muhammad Ali, his work translated from Arabic into English. All essentially in the same period, all from the same press, all in languages that are at loggerheads with one another, and yet find a place in Ibis Editions to coexist. What kind of flack do you get for not being on a certain side of the wall that's being constructed now? What kind of possibilities do you see to get past this truly horrific moment?
PC: This principle of juxtaposition is really central to what we're doing. In publishing what we call Levant-related literature, we think of ourselves, with all modesty, as a publisher without borders. Instead of seeing the region as a hotbed of polarities and antagonisms, we really do think of it in terms of a geography of the imagination, to take Davenport's term, and, in large part, because the work we've admired, both historically, and in terms of the contemporary scene, draws on an incredibly rich and diverse background, culturally and literarily. That diversity is extremely healthy in terms of the imagination, but it also contributes an element of surprise, which I think is central to the whole endeavor. So we've been trying in our lists to replicate the genetics of the work we admire; that is, we try to bring together often very different and distant kinds of literary works from the entire region, works which themselves may have migrated from even further away. The whole tradition of Levantine culture really is a tradition that thrives on difference and on dissonant adjacencies, which gives rise to a kind of loud coexistence of diverse elements. We've been trying to promote work that stands for that, and, at the same time, bring together work that other publishers might keep separate. The university presses, for instance, might have a series on Arabic literature, and they might have a series on Hebrew literature, and a series on Turkish literature, or they might even have a Middle Eastern series, but it tends to all be very much one person's version, often along a given political line. No one is really bringing together people who are politically at odds with one another, but who imaginatively are really quite close. Yet that is how we think the good writers writing here are thinking. If you look at some of the major poets in the area, that hybrid dimension is certainly evident in their work. As far as what kind of flack we've taken for that-- the truth is we really haven't taken a great deal of flack. If anything, we've gotten a tremendous amount of good will thrown our way. It may be just because we're dealing with poetry, and the people who tend to direct flack tend to aim at larger targets. Whatever the reason, it's been good will, and a feeling that, yes, these are bad times, but like-minded people have to work together. I must say that's really kept us going. The good will from all directions.
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