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A devastating revelation of violence, exploitation, and corrupt politics, Coming to Jakarta derives its title from the role played by the CIA, banks, and oil companies in the 1965 slaughter of more than half a million Indonesians. A former Canadian diplomat and now a scholar at the University of California, Peter Dale Scott has said that the poem is triggered by what we know of the bloody Indonesian massacre... However it is not so much a narrative of exotic foreign murder as one person's account of what it is like to live in the 20th century, possessing enough access to information and power to feel guilty about global human oppression, but not enough to deal with it. The usual result is a kind of daily schizophrenia by which we desensitize ourselves to our own responses to what we read in the newspapers. The psychic self-alienation which ensues makes integrative poetry difficult but necessary." With a brilliant use of collage, placing the political against the personal - childhood acquaintances are among the darkly powerful figures - Scott works in the tradition of Pound's Cantos, but his substance is completely his own. "… (more)
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[same review, unpublished final paragraph]: "The self-qualifying courage that determines the introduction of this anecdote can only contribute to the authority and distinction of the whole. It is a book which extends the scope of poetry, reclaiming some of the ground lost since Dryden, lost even since Pound. Pound largely postponed his misgivings about his didactic aims until the Pisan Cantos, but they are of the very texture of Scott's poetry. So this long poem is a true invention, complicating and modifying the Poundian model until it becomes something of Scott's own. It should be of interest to all who read poetry."
User reviews
Another unexpected dimension was just a bit of Quebec geography.
Scott was also apparently a member of the elite class. I have rubbed elbows occasionally with this set. Scott's poem gives a good feel for the relationships among these types, where uncles are ambassadors etc.
This is not a long poem or a difficult poem to read, even for someone like myself with quite limited experience in the poetry world. Sure, sometimes I had to try a few times to parse a complex sentence. But I never got the feeling that Scott was trying to dazzle me with his poetic prowess. Why write a poem about terror? Maybe it helps to create a little space, a sort of dreamy haze, where we can see the object in a more subdued way, a way that isn't as nauseating and mind-numbing as a cold confrontation would be. Maybe that bit of space is just the room we need to think how can we behave differently, to think about that without getting overwhelmed by shock and horror which tend to promote a desperate grasping at some other way, any other way. We need to learn to think carefully about these difficult subjects. Maybe Scott is showing us a way that can work.
Yeah we hear repeatedly in this poem from the Iliad and the Gita, classical poetic handling of similarly violent subjects. Here we are again, or really we never left this brutal world, our brutal nature. We probably can't smack ourselves out of it. Maybe we can charm ourselves out of it.