Peter Dale Scott

Peter Dale Scott (born 1929) is a Canadian poet and a former English professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The son of noted Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F. R. Scott, he is known for his anti-war stance and his criticism of U.S. foreign policy dating back to the Vietnam War. He spent five years (1957-1961) with the Canadian diplomatic service. He retired from the UC Berkeley faculty in 1994.

Literary Works

In terms of poetry, he is best known for his book-length poem Coming to Jakarta (subtitled "a poem about terror"), which describes in measured, prosodically regular verse the 1965 crisis in Indonesia that resulted in the Indonesian Civil War and the deaths of as many as half a million people, in which he believed the CIA to play a role.

Scott is far from a stridently political poet, working always to connect the polemical to the personal. In Coming to Jakarta he writes:

To have learnt from terror
        to see oneself
    as part of the enemy

can be a reassurance

In the context of this emotional and psychological side of conflict, Scott alternates between descriptions of his own life—"dressed up in polished / gaiters with a buttonhook"—and the massive violence of his principal subject. Somewhere between confessional and scholarly, his poems often contain citations in the margins.

Scott has described his poem Minding the Darkness as his most important, though he concedes that "Like other long poems by older men. . . it toys dangerously with abstract didactic principles." The poem is intended as the culmination of a major poetic project of which Coming to Jakarta was the inception.

Investigator

Scott has researched and written several investigative books that critics dismiss as conspiracy theories. However, Scott rejects this label and has used the phrase "deep politics" to describe his heavily-footnoted political writing. The investigative bent has spilled over into his works of poetry, some of which must contain marginal notes to explain to readers which documents or real-world news events are being referred to. His next book, due in 2007 from the University of California Press, deals with the events of 9/11.

Bibliography

Political

• The War Conspiracy (1972, out of print)
• The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in collaboration, 1976, ISBN 0-394-40107-7)
• Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977, ISBN 0-87867-066-1)
• The Iran-Contra Connection (in collaboration, 1987, ISBN 0-89608-291-1)
• Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (in collaboration, 1991, 1998, ISBN 0-520-21449-8)
• Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996, ISBN 0-520-20519-7)
• Deep Politics Two (from JFKLancer, 1995)
• Drugs Oil and War (2003, ISBN 0-7425-2522-8)
• The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America (2007, forthcoming)

Poetry

• Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989, ISBN 0-8112-1095-2)
• Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992, ISBN 0-8112-1214-9)
• Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994, ISBN 0-8112-1284-X)
• Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000 (2000, ISBN 0-8112-1454-0)

See also

• Deep politics

External links

• Peter Dale Scott
• Video interview
• Template:Google video - In his wide-ranging talk, Peter Dale Scott points out similarities that arise when you look at the assassination of JFK and the all events of 9/11. (COPA meeting in Dallas, Texas, November 18, 2006)