Coming to Jakarta : a poem about terror

by Peter Dale Scott

Paper Book, 1988

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Available

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Publication

New York : New Directions Pub. Corp., [1989], c1988.

Description

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)

Media reviews

"From Reznikoff to Public Enemy," Poetry Foundation, November 5, 2007: "When literature scholar Tracy Ware argued that 'Coming to Jakarta is in a way the long poem that [Noam] Chomsky never wrote,' he captured the essentially radical nature of Peter Dale Scott's odd and compelling epic. Yet
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Chomsky, the linguistic and political anarchist known for his unflappable rationalism, never evokes the subjective terror that Scott summons in this nerve-bundled recounting of the poet's heady encounters with international political intrigue."
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18 more
Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1988) [is] a remarkable book-length poem that fuses autobiography and political analysis unlike anything else in twentieth-century American poetry....
Modern Language Association Annual Convention, 2003
“The ‘Berkeley Mafia’ in Peter Dale Scott’s Coming to Jakarta: A Faculty Investigates Itself,” 2003 Modern Language Association Annual Convention, San Diego, 12/03: “a crystalline example of how a single, vast yet remote disaster can provide the fixed center for obsessive and personal
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poetry, especially when the causes of the disaster are close to home…..Coming to Jakarta pursues the roots of genocide, how the workings of political manipulation, money, international ruling-class interests and the intelligentsia can trigger immense human destruction. The CIA, Ford Foundation and ‘Berkeley Mafia’ helped establish the means for genocide…because it is poetry, Coming to Jakarta properly investigates how our passions and talents create cultural systems that can victimize us.”
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"The Shifting Sand of a Son's Radical Faith in Peter Dale Scott's Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror". University of Toronto Quarterly - Volume 71 Number 4, Fall 2002, 827-42.
Boston Review
"When Peter Dale Scott's remarkable and unnerving long poem, Coming to Jakarta appeared in 1988, it was recognized as a major work....An attempt to overcome the psychic self-alienation brought on by Scott's discovery of US involvement in the 1965 slaughter of more than half a million Indonesians,
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this immensely readable "poem about terror" uses a collage method to trace the links between the political machinations of imperial states and the actions of individual conscience."
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The Fiddlehead
"This is a book that says more than I can comprehend, is broader than what I can hear. It humbles: both by what in it is graspable and by the intimation it fosters of a range of utterance beyond what I can know....The moral beauty of the poem and its literary beauty are inseparable; it is a book in
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love with the absent good of the polis, a book of civic passion, but it strikes no fine pose, is not rectitudinous, does not lecture or labour at its virtue...it is not narcissistic....Scott's poem is autobiography but it is also a hermeneutic of political history since World War I....there is no impartial observer, no passive object over which such an observer has the rights of an interpreter. By indirection, by not hiding his confusion, but bespeaking his life, Scott hovers close to the centre of things....Because this recording is powerless...the poem while ambitious is humble. Silence or a humility that might just turn into compunction....
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Parnassus
Parnassus, 17/18, Spring 1993, 380-403: "a truly successful work of art....[Where other poets] give evidence...of the overloading of our circuits, Scott's terrifying, implacable tercets reveal to us precisely what has overloaded them. The author of this magnificent poem...started his career as a
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Canadian diplomat....To such a man poetry offers the extraordinary possibility of speaking the truth, by which I mean concrete and usable truths....This function of the poem, as a relay between readers and the sources of important information...seems revolutionary to me, at least on a scale like this....The poet has found words 'terrible enough,' has managed after all to replicate, in the defining medium of human culture, 'that jangling chord.' Coming to Jakarta is not the peacock's scream; it is the struggling self-control of a true and terrible poet of empire."
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Beloit Poetry Journal
"...an enormously important poem, moving between the poet's psyche and the appalling events in Indonesia."
TLS
"The structure of the poem is an accumulation of juxtapositions between the political and personal, the small and the large, the reflective and the anecdotal (a moment from a cocktail party in New York for the young and powerful is set beside an exquisite meditation on his wife; his life as consul
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in Warsaw in about 1960 comes next to an account of a historical Balinese mass-suicide, when a whole retinue drugged with opium walked deliberately into the fire of Dutch soldiers). Such a structure makes for a work of great richness and complexity."

[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."
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Poetry Flash
, "Designed and Executed," Poetry Flash November 1989: "....Coming to Jakarta is a poem about how our language...has continually betrayed us. But it is also, and more anguishedly, about personal guilt and unwitting complicity. It is about coming to grips with what that bloodbath tells us...about
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ourselves and our culture....At its most successful, one feels the intensity of his suppressed rage and confusion.....[H]e has undertaken something far more serious than we are used to in our poetry. The degree to which he has succeeded in giving memorable voice to his own pain and the silenced screams of the victims of U.S. sponsored mass terror makes Coming to Jakarta something rather special in our recent literature."
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Washington Post Book World
"a dreamlike meditation on the political corruption in the 20th century....These paradoxes are evocative and troubling....Scott's poem, for all its craziness and disorder, is real poetry, visionary and complex."
University of Toronto Quarterly
"Letters in Canada," University of Toronto Quarterly, Summer 1989, pp. 44-46: "...undoubtedly this year's most ambitious long poem....a net of connections that ends by delineating a new map of the world....a work that breaks down the genres of history and poetry to offer a new way of seeing the
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individual and society."
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Manchester Guardian Weekly
"a riveting long poem published this year which collages black facts about the pathology of power into a Canadian elegy for innocence and a childhood that was shadowed by those facts."
Toronto Sunday Star
"What is unexpected is the range that connects the philosophical and the personal, the cosmic vision and the precisely observed social detail. Scott's ability to hook up dockside sherry parties in North Hatley with the ritual suicide of the rajah of Den Pasar involves a startling imaginative leap;
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it's as if Proust had compressed his social panorama into 150 pages."
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Canadian Poetry
Canadian Poetry, V (for the Year 1988), 1990, 113-21: "The 'way' suggested by the poem is spiritual and creative: to open oneself up to the forces within instead of projecting them on to ghosts in the trees, or evil people in the Pentagon....The supple phrasal shiftings of Scott's line, which
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dispenses with punctuation and instead uses line-breaks to reflect rhetorical pauses and emphases, are wonderfully suited to the poet's meanderings among lyric moments and catalogues of horrors....Admiring his accomplishment in this first volume as I do, I look forward with greatest anticipation to the second."
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Beloit Poetry Journal
"Agni magazine (no 31/32)....The second feature in this excellent issue is a symposium on Peter Dale Scott's enormously important poem Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror...on the CIA involvement in the massacre of over half a million people in Indonesia in 1965. In addition to a statement by
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Scott, a section of a new poem by him, and an interview, are several valuable critical articles, including a magisterial analysis by Robert Hass, "Some Notes on Coming to Jakarta." The editors of Agni deserve our gratitude for calling attention to this major work."
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Agni, 31-32, (1990): "A moral intelligence and nerve that put one in mind of Mandelstam."
Agni
"Poetry and Politics: The Case of Coming to Jakarta," Agni, 31/32, 315-25: "One of the three or four books of the last ten years that make "political poetry" something more than a cheering-section for various fashionable causes....Unlike The Cantos, Coming to Jakarta is almost hypnotically
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readable. There are at least two reasons for this. One is Scott's personality. Wry, conscientious, self-deprecating, he never casts himself in a heroic role....Then there is the matter of form. Scott has learned everything there is to learn from Williams' variable foot....But even more, I am thinking of a narrative skill much more common among fiction writers than poets -- a seemingly digressive development that suddenly pulls tight as a net around the reader and the subject."
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Agni
"Some Notes on Coming to Jakarta," Agni, 31/32, pp. 334-61: "Coming to Jakarta is the most important political poem to appear in the English language in a very long time. Almost everything about it is deeply unexpected. It is, as its subtitle informs us, a poem about terror -- the subliminal,
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half-repressed terrors of private consciousness, terror as political violence...and also terror as a reasoned instrument of political policy. What makes the poem unexpected is not that it is about the first kind of terror, or even the second, but that it is also about the third, and that it tries to understand the relation among the three, for it has not been the case in the twentieth century that anyone who knew enough to write such a poem would write a poem at all.... So what Peter Dale Scott has undertaken in his long poem is both immensely ambitious and mostly unparalleled."
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User reviews

LibraryThing member kukulaj
I don't know about poetry or Indonesia. I don't know much about the dirty deeds departments of governments around the world. But all of these are important enough and this book helped expand my mind a bit in these various dimensions.

Another unexpected dimension was just a bit of Quebec geography.
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Scott apparently spend a lot of time growing up around Sherbrooke, which is not a place I can even remember having heard of before at all. But now I am thinking it might be grand to try riding my bike there. That is my usual reaction to hearing about a new place. It's a new destination for a bike tour!

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.
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