Peter Dale Scott
For those primarily interested in my recent political prose, go to my Current Publications Web Page, formerly entitled “Iraq, al-Qaeda, 9/11”. For those primarily interested in my poetry, go to My Selected Writings webpage. In fact the two genres inter-relate, as exhibited by both my most important prose book, The American Deep State, and my most recent books of poetry, Minding the Darkness, Mosaic Orpheus, Tilting Point, and Walking on Darkness.

For a useful overview of my political and poetic work on the Poetry Foundation website, click here. Click here to read about me on Wikipedia. .

Click here to see a description and above all reviews of my book, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy.

Click here for a website which accesses a series of videos in which I read and discuss my long poem Coming to Jakarta, and also my book of shorter poems, Tilting Point.

To hear my September 2011 reading of my poetry in Longfellow House, Cambridge, click here.

For occasional political comments and news about upcoming books and activities, follow my Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/peterdalescott.

Biography

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He was born in Montreal in 1929, the only son of the poet F.R. Scott and the painter Marian Dale Scott. He is married to the author and psychologist Ronna Kabatznick; and he has three children, Cassie, Mika, and John Scott, by a previous marriage to the Soto Zen roshi Maylie [Marshall] Scott. Before teaching as an English Professor at the University of California, he served for four years as a Canadian diplomat, at UN Assemblies and in Warsaw, Poland.

His prose books include The War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in collaboration, 1976), Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977), The Iran-Contra Connection (in collaboration, 1987),Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (in collaboration, 1991, 1998), Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Deep Politics Two (1994, 1995, 2006), Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003), The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press,(2008), American War Machine (2010), and The American Deep State, 2014.

His chief poetry books are the three volumes of his trilogy Seculum: Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1989), Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992), and Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000. In addition he has published Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems (1994, published in Canada as Murmur of the Starsi), Mosaic Orpheus (2009), Tilting Point (2012), and Walking on Darkness. In November 2002 he was awarded the Lannan Poetry Award.

An anti-war speaker during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, he was a co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at UC Berkeley, and of the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA).

His poetry has dealt with both his experience and his research, the latter of which has centered on U.S. covert operations, their impact on democracy at home and abroad, and their relations to the John F. Kennedy assassination and the global drug traffic. The poet-critic Robert Hass has written (Agni, 31/32, p. 335) that “Coming to Jakarta is the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time.”

If you have any comments or questions, I would be glad to hear from you at pdscottweb@hotmail.com.

I do believe that international public opinion, when it becomes powerful enough, will become the most effective restraint to the excesses and follies of particular governments.