so the long stretch of life / reveals its curvature / by those widely separated // moments when we are / brushed / by this awareness // of an other / that we do not know

In his latest collection of poems, poet, deep state researcher, and radical medievalist Peter Dale Scott interrogates topics that have occupied his later thought and writing, such as moreness (our need, as humans, to be more than we are), minding, and enmindment (the generative synergy, engaging both hemispheres of our bicameral mind, of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, now out of kilter).

In pursuit of these themes, Scott’s voice ranges far, from engaging with poets of the past and, hopefully, the future to critiques of coercive political power, from elegies for important figures in his life – Leonard Cohen, Daniel Ellsberg, Czeslaw Milosz, and Robert Silvers – to fan letters for “minders” Chelsea Manning and Dr Christine Blasey Ford.

Dreamcraft is a book that crosses distances and straddles boundaries, moving from whistleblower law to the mimetic properties of DNA, from “the entropic spread / of the drifting cosmos / after the big bang” to “the push of lawn grass / under foot.”

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His diplomatic service from 1957 to 1961 included two years of work at UN conferences and the UN General Assembly, as well as two years in Poland. In addition to teaching poetry and medieval literature at Berkeley, he was a cofounder of the university’s Peace & Conflict Studies (PACS) program.

Scott’s most recent political books are The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007); The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (2008); American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (2010); and The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (2014).

Scott’s books have been translated into six languages, and his articles and poems have been translated into twenty. The former US poet laureate Robert Hass has written that, “Coming to Jakarta is the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time.” In 2002, Dale Scott received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.

Scott’s website is www.peterdalescott.net and his Facebook page is www.facebook.com/peter.d.scott.9.

Peter Dale Scott's profile page

“That Scott’s oeuvre demands the engaged reader to consider and wrestle with the art of poetry, poetry and politics, investigative fact and visionary fiction is evidence of its sophisticated achievement. Such reflection, it has long seemed to me, is the condition for any understanding of poetry, worthy of the name, an understanding that needs precede any critical appraisal. This resistance to a ready assimilation to existing literary-aesthetic canons – despite the surface, apparently-prosaic transparency of the poetry – testifies to Scott’s poetry’s being poetry, making, creating works possessed of a novel uncanniness that adds something new, not merely accomplished, to the world of letters, if not the world-at-large.” Bryan Sentes

Related link: Review, Bryan Sentes https://bryansentes.com/2024/04/16/an-old-mans-eagle-mind-on-peter-dale-scotts-dreamcraft/