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Peter Dale Scott |
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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2008) |
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.
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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:
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."1 The poem is intended as the culmination of a major poetic project of which Coming to Jakarta was the inception.
Scott has researched and written several investigative books about the role of the "deep state" (as opposed to the "public state"). However, Scott rejects the label of "conspiracy theory" 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 most recent book, The Road to 9/11 from the University of California Press, deals with historical and geopolitical context of the events of 9/11.
An interesting aspect of Scott's work that combines both his investigating interests and his poetry is illustrated by The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/112. Of particular note is its discussion of Far West Ltd.
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| NAME | Scott, Peter Dale |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Canadian poet and academic |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1929 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Canada |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
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