Summary: Peter Cole thinks of all poetry as translation. "Writing one's own poetry, you're translating a nonverbal experience or a less than articulate experience into something much more articulate," he told Art Beat. In addition to writing his own, Cole translates Hebrew and Arabic poetry into English. When Cole finished translating 2,000 years of Jewish mystical poetry for his previous project "The Poetry of Kabbalah" (Yale University Press, 2012), he was ready to start producing his own work again, but it wasn't a simple or easy transition.
