As writer, translator, and editor of an independent publishing press, you juggle many creative projects and responsibilities. Do you have a work routine?

Only that I try to show up every day, preferably early. The poet John Wieners once said something that has stayed with me. When asked what his method was, he said, “Arm against the hard brown desk.”

Obviously there is a certain amount of juggling going on, but really no more than everyone is engaged with: work, family, writing, friends, service of a sort. I often try to compartmentalize — but things tend to spill over from one area of engagement to another, and in the long run that’s for the better.

Beyond the page (outside of literature), how would you like to reach out towards a wider humanity?

Good literature is, as I see it, already “beyond the page,” as it moves into people’s lives. But I also take real pleasure in reading poems in public, and I enjoy teaching and take that encounter seriously. There are also sporadic periods of direct or indirect political engagement. All that and daily life as it takes shape all around me is humanity enough.

Peter Cole
BY Lynn Saville
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE POET

How do you nourish yourself spiritually once you step out of your writing life into the so-called banal quotidian world? That is, how do you keep your inquisitiveness alive and constantly stay alert?

I don’t find the quotidian world banal at all — at least not usually, and so long as shopping malls are kept out of the equation. Everything’s interesting, at least in principle, though “staying open,” as I think the great dance critic and poet Edwin Denby once wrote, “is everyone’s problem.” As for how to stay open — well, for one, there’s luck. That is, letting oneself stumble onto (and sometimes into) things and allowing them to lead to other things one might never have noticed. I also have a tendency to rotate the literary crops — in terms of period and mode, content and form. And I have a weakness for challenging projects, so I have no choice but to learn new things and enter new worlds. That’s been a blessing. Moreover, my wife, who is also a writer, is extremely curious, and both reads and gets out a lot. So, if all else fails — as it often does — I can always just check in with her.