b-ii

PETER DALE SCOTT: SELECTED WRITINGS
II. POETRY AND TRANSLATION
To hear my September 2011 reading of my poetry in Longfellow House, Cambridge, click here.

Click here for a list of my published poems.

Click here for D.457 (a political poem) “Greek Theater: Mario Savio and the Socratic Quest.”. http://www.comingtojakarta.net/2014/09/07/greek-theater/.

To see me reading my poetry go to

V.60 “An Evening of Political Poetry, FSM and Today,” I read part of “Greek Theater: Mario Savio and the Socratic Quest, starting at 12:50 on the tape.

V.58 Peter Dale Scott Poetry at the Open Center. I read Section III.viii of Listening to the Candle (pp. 85-89), a poem to my daughter Cassie. Excerpted from a video of a reading at the Open Center, New York, March 17, 2010, as part of a week-long event in my honor.
OR
V.57 “The ‘Coming to Jakarta’ video commentary series: a series of videos discussing sections of Coming to to Jakarta,” interspersed with other videos on deep politics.

My latest book of poems, Walking on Darkness (2016), is now available from Word Palace Press. 
You can click here to order it from Amazon.

My latest book of poems, Tilting Point (2012), is now available from Word Palace Press. 
You can click here to order it from Amazon. Click here to see reviews. Click here to watch a video of my reading and discussing some of the poems in the book.

The following poems from Tilting Point are viewable on line:

D.447 (a political poem) “Remembering Denise and People’s Park,” Consequence Magazine, Spring 2013, http://www.consequencemagazine.org/excerpts/scott_remembering_denise.html .

D.445 “Excerpts from Tilting Point” (“Homing,” “Without Words,””Not for Long”),www.wordpalacepress.com/excerpts/tilting.pdf

D. 431a [poem] “Changing North America, Consequence, 4:1, Spring 2012, 9-25, http://www.consequencemagazine.org/PDScott.html. The print version of D.431.

D.431 [Poem] “Changing North America”, Japan Focus: Asia Pacific Journal, June 27, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/site/view/3553.

D.415 [Poem] “From a Viewpoint Halfway Up the Telegraph Canyon Fire Trail I Look Across to the Golden Gate,” Dhammamoon, December 2010, http://www.dhammamoon.org/poets/peter-dale-scott/from-a-viewpoint-halfway-up-the-telegraph-canyon-fire-trrail-i-look-across-to-the-golden-gate.html.

D.409 “To the Tea-Party Patriots”, GlobalResearch, November 2, 2010, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21727>

D.406 “In Honor of Pat Tillman:” A Poem: “Something we miss in this country, ” Infowars.com, August 30, 20`0, www.infowars.com/in-honor-of-pat-tillman/.

D.405 “Loving America,” A Poem: “Love the people not the government”, GlobalResearch.ca, July 31, 2010, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20394

My book of poems, Mosaic Orpheus (2009), is available from McGill-Queen’s University Press.
You can click here to order it from Amazon. Click here for reviews.

[  Reviews ]

[ Other poems by Peter Dale Scott on line ]

A.66 “Dying In“, Vehicule Press Blog, November 20, 2011, http://vehiculepress.blogspot.com/2011/11/sunday-poem_20.html.

D.18 (Four Poems) “Les Bouffons d”Apres-Guerre” (“The Interpreter,” “Green Girl,” “Riviera Salesman,” Parole”). Poetry (Chicago) XCVIII, 1 (April 1961), 26-29.

[  Video of Peter Dale Scott reading his poetry

Peter Dale Scott Poetry at the Open Center , New York, March 17, 2010

Peter Dale Scott reads from Mosaic Orpheus, July 16, 2009  ]

[  Audio of Peter Dale Scott reading his poetry:

Peter Dale Scott reading at Atwater Poetry Project, September 18, 2008. ]

[  Selections Poems on the website DhammaMoon: “Almond Tree,” (Excerpts from) “Space Sonnets,” “Coast Trail,” “from Birdnotes,” “Above Siberia,” “Home,” “Walking Meditation,” “Marianna,” “Wat Pah Nanachat,” “Breathing Exercise: A How-To Poem,” “No Third World.”  ]

[  Bibliography of Poetry Books and Chapbooks  ]

[  Bibliography of Uncollected and Occasional Poems  ]

Previously unpublished poems from new book, Mosaic Orpheus (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Spring 2009):

D.398 “For Maylie Scott,” Ryga: A Journal of Provocations (Okanagan, BC) 1 (Fall 2009), 153-64.

D.370 [Poem] “A Simple, Difficult Lesson in Thai.” Literary Review of Canada, 16,7 (September 2008), 19.

D.366 (Poem) “Breathing Exercise: A How-To Poem,” Queen’s Quarterly, June 2008, 316-17.

D.360 “Marianna.” AQR: Alaska Quarterly Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 & 2, Spring & Summer 2008, 229-30.

D.357 “Mosaic of Orpheus: Five Canadian Poems”. (“Occitanian Spring,” “Something Precious,” “Holy Land I: Truth,” “Holy Land II: Force,” “Confession”.) FlashPoint #10, Spring 2008, http://www.flashpointmag.com/index10.htm.

D.352 (two poems) “Luzern Symposium: Der inszenierte Terrorismus” and “Recalling V-J Day, 8/15/1945.” nthposition online magazine, January 8, 2008. http://www.nthposition.com/luzernsymposiumder.php.

D.351 “Five poems: Cape Flattery, Washington, Turn of a Century, Mendocino, Words to Du Fu from the Oakland Airport Parking Lot, The Tao of 9/11.” Jacket 34, October 2007. http://jacketmagazine.com/34/scott-p-d-5p.shtml. (For earlier versions of “The Tao of 9/11,” see D.316 “A Ballad of Drugs and 9/11.” FlashPoint, Spring 2006; also Lobster, October 2005.)

D. 349 [Six poems] “Difficulty,” “Pelican,” “Kingfisher,” Graces,” “Non E Cosa in Terra,” “Christmas Retreat: Commutung to the Land of Medicine Buddha,” Heyoka Magazine, http://heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.9.PeterDaleScott.htm.

D.338 [Poem] “Making History, Unfolding World.” FlashPoint, Spring 2007, http://www.flashpointmag.com/scottmh.htm.

D.339 [Poem] “The Size of Earth: A Short, Simple Poem to Get Us Out of Iraq.” FlashPoint, Spring 2007, http://www.flashpointmag.com/scottse.htm.

D.316 “A Ballad of Drugs and 9/11.” FlashPoint, Spring 2006.

For the original and quite different October 2005 version of this poem, focused less on America, seeLobster.

C.67 The Riddle

To hear this poem click here

POETS OF ENGAGEMENT BLURBED BY PETER DALE SCOTT

Crossing Borders: Selected Shorter Poems. New York: New Directions, 1994. Published in Canada as Murmur of the Stars: Selected Shorter Poems. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1994.

Reviews

Carmine Starnino, Montreal Gazette, Dec. 24, 1994: “Scott’s poetry…is marked by a simple faith in life and an infinite sympathy for all things aninmate and inanimate. This is a book about the natural world as a spiritual resource….The art in Scott’s poetry lies in the balance his short, clipped lines strike between colloquial ease and structural constraint, between instinct and logic. The best poems…display a use of language that is original and disarming, with remarkable evocative powers….He is able to take us past the words and their meaning to where the true vitality of understanding lies….his strategy is, in a way, Chekovian: to weave the fabric of the poem so persuasively that its meaning can be felt only indirectly….It seems that we are looking at possibly more than the poetic instinct and skill of a major poet, but maybe, just maybe, at a wonderful new departure in the Canadian lyric. Scott…might very well help vitally redefine the way we think and feel in Canadian poetry.”

Joshua Weiner, Boston Review, Feb.-Mar. 1995, 31-32: “Scott now demonstrates a…combination of intellectual passion, self-deprecation, seriousness of purpose, and muted humor…set to a variety of intentions….Reminiscent of late Williams in the measuring of perception and phrase to the line, Scott achieves a more muscular and condensed expression; one which, though natural speech, avoids diffusiveness….These are not poems flashy in their effects, which is fitting to Scott’s tone — steady, meditative, adequately distant to record the movement of mind and the events in the poet’s life without excessive self-dramatization. More than the psycho-drama of autobiography, Scott is interested in tracing the connections between personal events and a more worldly and sometimes hidden network….Like Pound, Scott is drawn in other poems to the example of the classical Chinese poets, and perhaps shares even more of their sensibility….Scott’s work is rooted in a physical, sensual earthiness; from that location, and from a grounding in himself, he ponders the nature of selflessness.”

J.B. Kennedy, Easy Reader (South Bay, CA), 8/17/95: “To read this book is to encounter a writer of conscience, intelligence, and eloquence, a candid and humane activist, an adventurer, traveler, runner, a penetrating scholar, and teacher….Find this book. In the bludgeoning crush of public events, this book refreshes by reminding one that some valuable human beings with authentic voices are still among us.”

Scott Ellis, Books in Canada, Summer 1995, 30: “Murmur of the Stars is a rich, humane, tough book, drawn with a delicate, occasionally dark, wit.”

|  Poems  ]

Rumors of No Law: Poems from Berkeley 1968-1977. Austin: Thorp Springs Press, 1981. pp. 88.

Zbigniew Herbert, Selected Poems, translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968: Penguin Modern European Poets. With an Introduction by A. Alvarez, and a Translators’ Note. Reprinted in England (London: Carcanet, 1985) and the United States (New York: Ecco, 1986).

    • Neal Ascherson, “Foreword,” in

The Mature Laurel: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry

    • , ed. Adam Czerniawski, p. x: “John Osborne guesses that ‘certain translations…might constitute an intervention in British poetry as momentous as Chapman’s Homer. I believe this to be true, and…we should add the work of Bogdana and John Carpenter on Herbert, of Czeslaw Milosz on his own poetry and (with P.D. Scott) on Herbert’s, of Bogdan Czaykowski and many others.”

 

    Joseph Brodsky [from book]: “As long as the species exists, this book will be timely.”
    • J.M. Coetzee, “Homage,”

Threepenny Review

    , Spring 1993: “Herbert has been fortunate in his translators: Peter Dale Scott and Czeslaw Milosz, John and Bogdana Carpenter. I know no Polish, but Herbert, in their translations, came to form part of the landscape of my mind.”
    • C.69. Zbigniew Herbert.

The Collected Poems: 1956-1998

    , translated by Alissa Valles, with additional trnslations by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott. Introduction by Adam Zagajewski. New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007. Reprints translations from B.3.

D.353 “Expanses of the Unspoken: An Interview with Peter Dale Scott” [about translating Zbigniew Herbert]. Words Without Borders Forum, January 2008, http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?thread=PeterDaleScottInterview.

D.354 “Translating Pebble with Czeslaw Milosz,” Words Without Borders Forum, January 2008, http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?thread=Pebble.

[  “Magpiety” (Milosz translation)  ]

[  Herbert translations  ]

Poems (Oxford: Fantasy, 1952), Prepositions of Jet Travel (Berkeley: Berkeley Poetry Review, 1981); Heart’s Field (Berkeley: Aroca, 1986); Coming to Jakarta/ Listening to the Candle: Reed Foundation Poetry Chapbook # 11 (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1989) [chapbooks].

“Greek Theater”

Complete Bibliography