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 have played 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.
Read more about this topic: Peter Dale Scott
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