Lexington Books Poetry and Terror: Politics and Poetics in Coming to Jakarta (AsiaWorld)

A study at many levels of Scott's long poem Coming to Jakarta, a book-length response to a midlife crisis triggered in part by the author's initial inability to share his knowledge and horror about American involvement in the great Indonesian massacre of 1965. Interviews with Ng supply fuller information about the poem's discussions of: a) how this psychological trauma led to an explorations of violence in American society and then, after a key recognition, in the poet himself; b) the poem's look at east-west relations through the lens of the yin-yang, spiritual-secular doubleness of the human condition; c) how the process of writing the poem led to the recovery of memories too threatening at first to be retained by his normal presentational self, and d) the mystery of right action, guided by the Bhagavad Gita and the maxim in the Gospel of Thomas that "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you." Led by the interviews to greater self-awareness, Scott then analyses his poem as also an elegy, not just for the dead in Indonesia, but "for the passing of the Sixties era, when so many of us imagined that a Movement might achieve major changes for a better America." Subsequent chapters develop how human doubleness can lead to an inner tension between the needs of politics and the needs of poetry, and how some poetry can serve as a non-violent higher politics, contributing to the evolution of human culture and thus our "second nature." The book also reproduces a Scott prose essay, inspired by the poem, on the U.S. involvement in and support for the 1965 massacre. It then discusses how this essay was translated into Indonesian and officially banned by the Indonesian dictatorship, and how ultimately it and the poem helped inspire the ground-breaking films of Josh Oppenheimer that have led to the first official discussions in Indonesia of what happened in 1965. Review Coming to Jakarta (1988) was probably the first poem to actually shock readers since The Waste Land (1922). Both poems are tied to cataclysmic events, The Waste Land to the horror of World War I, Jakarta to the under-reported massacre of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians in 1965, with encouragement and support from the United States. Poetry and Terror is a welcome addition to the growing literature surrounding Peter Dale Scott's masterpiece. Calling it an elegy 'for the passing of an era when many had hopes for major changes in America, ' when America still had the reputation of advancing 'universal principles, ' Coming to Jakarta is now seen as an early warning that democracy in America has been abridged from encroachments by the deep state. Most of the book is taken up with an extended interview of Scott by a former student, Freeman Ng, which is essentially a close reading of Jakarta. More important, in Poetry and Terror Scott asserts his belief that by turning from the prose exposés for which he had long been known to the writing of poetry, he found a way to release the hidden half of what he calls the double self. The protocols of academic argument stood in the way of his seeing clearly and therefore stating his own connection to the truth of the deep state's activity in Indonesia. The experience left him with the conviction that in all art we have 'a form of corrective alterity, ' or more precisely, 'that poetry can be part of humanity's approach to truth' and thereby to the recovery of justice.--Roger Mitchell, Emeritus Professor, Indiana University Coming to Jakarta was one of the most important public poems of the late twentieth century. Not identity politics, not liberal mea culpa, it offered information the mainstream media would not disseminate, and then pondered the psychic cost of knowing such things but being helpless. Good, then, to have a book that explores the background of the poem, and also testifies, through reflections on Milton and Milosz, to Scott's growing faith that poetry can indeed chan