Peter Dale Scott

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Peter Dale Scott in 2011. Photo by Robert B. Livingston. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Peter Dale Scott (born January 11, 1929) is a Canadian poet, and a former diplomat and academic.

Life

Scott was born in Montreal, the only son of painter Marian Dale Scott and Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F.R. Scott.

He spent 4 years (1957-1961) with the Canadian diplomatic service.

A long-time English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, he has been critical of American foreign policy since the era of the Vietnam War. Scott was a signatory in 1968 of the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, in which participants vowed to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. He retired from the UC Berkeley faculty in 1994.

Writing

Poetry

In terms of poetry, Scott 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 have played a role.(Citation needed)

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.

Contemporary politics

Drugs and the Economy - Peter Dale Scott on Economics 101 (1 2)

Peter Dale Scott on Covert Politics May 17, 2013

Peter Dale Scott 2010 "Continuity of Government"

Scott has written about the role of the "deep state" (as opposed to the "public state"). Rejecting the label of "conspiracy theory", he has used the phrase "deep politics" to describe his political concerns. His interest in contemporary history 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 book, The Road to 9/11 (2007), deals with geopolitical context of events leading to 9/11, and describes "how U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s has led to partial or total cover-ups of past domestic criminal acts, including, perhaps, the catastrophe of 9/11." The Road to 9/11 is the only one of Peter Dale Scott's book available in French under the title La Route vers le Nouveau Désordre Mondial. The latter was reviewed in March 2011 by Bernard Norlain, a retired French five-star General of the Air Force.

Of Scott's book, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (2010) Daniel Ellsberg commented: "I said of Scott's last brilliant take on this subject, Drugs, Oil and War, that 'It makes most academic and journalistic explanations of our past and current interventions read like government propaganda written for children.' Now Scott has written an even better book [...]"

An 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 9/11.

Publications

Poetry

• [Poems]. Oxford, UK: Fantasy Press (The Fantasy Poets #6), 1952.
• Rumors of No Law: Poems from Berkeley 1968-1977. Austin, TX: Thorp Springs Press, 1981.
• Prepositions of Jet Travel. Berkeley: Berkeley Poetry Review Chapbook, 1981.
• Heart's Field. Berkeley: Aroca Press, 1986.
• Coming to Jakarta: A poem About terror. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988; New York: New Directions, 1989.
• [From] Coming to Jakarta: A poem About terror [&] Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse. New York: Dia Art Foundation (Readings in Contemporary Poetry, Number 11: Peter Dale Scott. The Reed Foundation Poetry Chapbook Series), 1989.
• Listening to the Candle: A poem on impulse. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1992; New York: New Directions. 1992.
• Crossing Borders: Selected shorter poems. New York: New Directions, 1994.
  • published in Canada as Murmur of the Stars: Selected Shorter poems. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1994.
• Minding the Darkness: A poem for the year 2000. New York: New Directions, 2000.
• Mosaic Orpheus. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the University of Toronto.

Non-fiction

• The War Conspiracy: The secret road to the second Indochina war. New York and Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972.
• Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate connection (foreword by Sylvia Meagher). Berkeley, CA: Westworks, 1977; Santa Barbara, CA: Open Archive Press, 1993.
• Northwards Without North: Bush, counterterrorism, and the continuation of secret power. An analysis of the Congressional Iran-Contra Report. Washington, DC: International Center for Development Policy, 1988; Elgin, TX: Association for Responsible Dissent, 1988.
• Peter Dale Scott & Jonathan Marshall, Obstruction of Justice: The Reagan-Bush coverup of the Contra drug connection. Excerpts from Peter Dale Scott's chapters in an early version of Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Washington: Christic Institute, 1990. Pp. 83.
• Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.
  • (with a new preface). Berkeley, CA, & Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1998.
• Deep Politics II: Essays on Oswald, Mexico, and Cuba; the new revelations in U.S. government files, 1994-1995. Skokie, IL: Green Archive Publications, 1995;
  • Revised Edition, 1996. Grand Prairie, TX: JFKLancer Publications, 1996.
  • 3rd Edition. Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2007; http://www.maryferrell.org.
• "The Official Story: What the government Has admitted about CIA ties to drug traffickers." An Analysis by Peter Dale Scott. (introduction and Editing by Martha Honey). A Special Report of the Institute for Policy Studies. July 1999.
• Drugs, Contras and the CIA: Government policies and the cocaine economy; an analysis of media and government response to the Gary Webb stories in the San Jose Mercury News (1996-2000). Los Angeles: From the Wilderness Publications, 2000.
• Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina. Lanham: MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
• The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.
• The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008.
• American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Pp. xii, 396.
• Poets Who Grow Gardens in Their Heads (The Judith Lee Stronach Memorial Lecture on the Teaching of Poetry). Berkeley, CA: The Bancroft Library, University of California, 2011.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy Peter Dale Scott.

Audio / video

Peter Dale Scott Poetry at the Open Center

• Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (read by Butch Hoover). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1993. Cassette books, RC 43096. .

See also

• List of Canadian poets
• Deep politics

External links

Poems

• Five poems at Jacket Magazine
• Peter Dale Scott at Canadian Poetry Online (profile & 6 poems)
• Peter Dale Scott b. 1929 at the Poetry Foundation

Audio / video

• Peter Dale Scott at Amazon.ca
• Interview from Electric Politics
• Peter Dale Scott at Amazon.ca

About

• Peter Dale Scott Official website.
• "Expanses of the Unspoken: An interview with Peter Dale Scott" from Words Without Borders, 2008

Etc.

• Deep Politics Forum