The Invention of Influence

by Peter Cole, Harold Bloom (Foreword by)

Overview

A dazzling new book by a writer with "perhaps the most capacious command of the Jewish poetic tradition of any poet now writing in English"(Religion and Literature)

Peter Cole has been called "an inspired writer" (The Nation) and “one of the handful of authentic poets of his own American generation” (Harold Bloom). In this, his fourth book of poems, he presents a ramifying vision of human linkage. At the heart of the collection stands the stunning title poem, which brings us into the world of Victor Tausk, a maverick and tragic early disciple of Freud who wrote about one of his patients’ mental inventions — an "influence machine" that controlled his thoughts. In Cole’s symphonic poem, this machine becomes a haunting image for the ways in which tradition and the language of others shape so much of what we think and say. The shorter poems in this rich and surprising volume treat the dynamics of coupling, the curiously varied nature of perfection,the delights of the senses, the perils of poetic vocation, and more.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811221726
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/29/2014
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Peter Cole’s previous books of poems include Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions). Among his volumes of translation are The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition and The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492. Cole, who divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. His many distinguished books include The Anxiety of Influence (1973, 1997), The Western Canon (1994), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), and How to Read and Why (2000).

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

I

Of Time and Intensity 3

On Being Partial 4

Actual Angels 5

On Finishing 10

On Coupling 11

A Palette 14

More for Santob 18

Paranoia: A Prologue 21

Paranoia: A Primer 23

Song of the Shattering Vessels 25

The Reluctant Kabbalist's Sonnet 27

II

The Invention of Influence: An Agon 31

III

A Byzantine Diptych

I Leviticus Again 85

II On What is Not Consumed 86

Abulafia Said That 87

The Perfect State 88

Notes from an Essay on the Uncanny 90

The Qualmist Aging 92

Okay, Koufonissi 93

Summer Syntax 96

Quatrains for a Calling 97

Self-Portrait in Pieces 100

Six Cheers for von Hofmannsthal 101

More on Finishing 103

Philo in His Confusion 104

Tutelary 105

A Song of Dissent 106

On Making and Being Made 107

Pathetic 108

What Makes Our Sense Make Sense 109

Being Led 110

What Is 111

Notes 115

Editorial Reviews

02/03/2014
MacArthur Fellow Cole’s fourth volume of original poetry (after Things On Which I’ve Stumbled) retains tangible traces of his work as a translator of the poetry of Hebrew mystics. These poems extend the mystics’ project, seeking the spiritual self and finding it, quite often, in the threshold between “world” and “word.” Split into three sections, this book begins and ends with Cole’s attempt to arrive, through poems whose prosody bears the heavy influence of Dickinson and Blake, at his own tractate in which a reader may find the glimmer of an answer, however liminal: “Only angels in the poem live on// as characters catching the light between things.” But it is the middle section, the collection’s eponymous long poem, that is by far its most absorbing. The story of Freud’s under-appreciated and complicated disciple Victor Tausk, who developed the concept of the “influence machine” to which the paranoid schizophrenic falls prey, serves as a rich backdrop against which Cole deeply explores wide ranging concerns. Textured with rabbinic teachings, translations of the letters of Tausk and Freud, and Cole’s own voice, the masterful long poem is “born of a need to explain the cause/ of things inherent in man.” (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Cole is not a household name, but this MacArthur Fellow has had a long and impressive career as a poet. There is a quiet, streaming power in his work that leads the reader back to it over and over again."

The Bloomsbury Review

"Cole’s poetry is remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off — the affective range is wide and the forms restless."

Bomb - Ben Lerner

"Cole (The Poetry of the Kabbalah, 2012) is an esteemed and prolific translator, concentrating on Hebrew literature, notably poetry from medieval Spain, and the recipient of many honors, including a MacArthur “genius grant.” The Invention of Influence is his fourth collection, and it is masterful. Harold Bloom’s introduction—an imprimatur of quality if there ever was one—combines fulsome praise with careful and welcome exposition of some of the countless allusions in this deeply allusive, profound, committed verse. The long narrative title poem examines the life and work of Victor Tausk, an early disciple of Freud who committed suicide. The variety of verse forms, the attention to and respect for Tausk’s complex path, the pressure the poem contains and releases—it might be a masterpiece. Unsurprisingly, Cole seems concerned most often with translation, in all its possible permutations: from language to language, from idea into word, from the unspeakable into speech: “We’re not quite sons, he cautions, of God— / but might be children of the Word.”"

The Invention of Influence - Booklist - Michael Autrey

04/15/2014
Veteran poet and MacArthur Fellow Cole (Things on Which I've Stumbled) writes beautifully about the intricacies of the world that we see and the one we imagine and connect our thoughts to—"He turns the wind into his messenger." Surrendered to the mystical, grounded in the physical, the poems arrive at their appointed time. Like the parts of Cole's Influence Machine "we are what we become in its import"—unfinished yet refined we sway with his lines in the rhythm of a lyrical truth—"Words are seeds, like taste on another's tongue."—AP

Library Journal