Poet and translator Coleman Barks’s pursuit of the 13th-century mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi has led him down many strange paths, none quite so bizarre as the 2005 pilgrimage he made to Afghanistan as a guest of the U.S. government.

“The State Department sent me there to celebrate the fact that Rumi is the national poet of Afghanistan,” Barks tells the Straight, in a telephone conversation from his Athens, Georgia, home. “There, he’s on the radio all the time, and he was also, for a while anyway, the most read poet in the United States. The State Department hadn’t sent a speaker over there in 25 years, but they decided to ask me to do it and so I did. I had military accompaniment everywhere I went, jeeps with automatic weapons before and behind.

“You know,” he adds, imitating a walkie-talkie’s signature squawk, “ ‘We got the poet.’ Oh my god, it was ridiculous.”

The trip’s many absurd moments included giving a private reading for the Herat Literary Society, “the most wonderful group of alpha males that you’ve ever seen”.

“It’s the fire chief, and the police chief, and the mayor, and all the doctors—and they met every Thursday to read each other their own poems,” Barks recalls. “So they let me come there and read some Rumi and some of my own poems—and there was no applause. They just looked at me and nodded their heads, you know.”

That’s not the kind of response he normally receives. As a hero to poets and seekers alike, the 77-year-old is used to standing ovations rather than the Herat Literary Society’s cool appraisal. His visit to the Afghan city was a personal milestone nonetheless, for it included an introduction to the Sufi elder Omani Chishti, who in turn gave him an important clue about Rumi’s companion and muse, Shams Tabrizi.

“I got to sit with him and have tea for an afternoon,” says Barks. “And at one point I asked, ‘Who is Shams?’ And he said, ‘Shams is a doctor who comes when you hurt enough. In the 13th century, the longing was deep enough, but now it’s not, so he doesn’t come.’

“I love that man,” he adds. “He was just wonderful.”

Barks has been pondering Chishti’s cryptic response for almost a decade. Further answers to his initial question will be unveiled in his forthcoming book Soul Fury: The Friendship of Rumi and Shams Tabrizi, in which the American poet steps away from channelling Rumi in order to give the quiet and down-to-earth physician his voice.

Barks reads a significant passage: “I swear to God I am not able to know, really know, Rumi/There’s no false modesty or deception in my saying this/Every day I learn things about his state and his actions that were not there yesterday/He is so alive and in motion that I cannot know him/He has a beautiful face and presence/And he speaks eloquent words, but do not be satisfied with those/There’s something beyond the form and the words/Beyond his face and the poetry/Try to seek that something from him.”

“When I read those things, my voice changes,” he continues, wondering. “It gets a kind of flinty feel to it, you know? Shams says ‘I get bored with too much gentleness,’ and most people say ‘Yeah, me too.’ So this has a good, healing quality of bitterness to it. It’s not maybe the whole truth, but it’s a part that we’ve been neglecting.”

Barks is still considering what kind of music would best accompany his Shams poems. When it comes to presenting Rumi’s work, however, it will be hard to top the band that will join him for his upcoming Indian Summer Festival appearance. Vancouver-based singer Jamal Salavati, sitarist Mohamed Assani, barbat virtuoso Hossein Behroozinia, and percussionist Hamin Honari will fuse Persian and North Indian styles in a sonic reflection of Rumi’s message of universal love.

Barks and the musicians will have only the briefest of rehearsals, but he’s not worried about that, citing music’s power to connect audience and performers alike. “We’re all afloat in the music together,” he says, “in a way that we aren’t when the music is not there.”

Coleman Barks presents 100 Ways to Kiss the Ground as part of the Indian Summer Festival, at St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church on Saturday (July 5).