Minding the Darkness (review)

Probably the two most widely-known facts about Ezra Pound are, first, that he wrote a complex and difficult book-length poem titled Cantos and, second, that he was a Fascist sympathizer imprisoned by the United States at the end of World War II for his pro-Mussolini wartime radio broadcasts. There is an irony, perhaps even a kind of unlikely but welcome justice, to be savored in the way so many of the poets who followed Pound's template for the modern American long poem (erudite, polyglot, history-haunted, quotation-studded) happened to have decidedly leftist politics. Charles Olson, author of The Maximus Poems, spent years in Washington working for the New Deal. Louis Zukofsky, author of A, was in and out of the orbit of the Communist Party during the 1920s and '30s. Robert Duncan, pieces of whose long poems Structures of Rime and Passages appeared in various of his volumes, was a gay liberation advocate decades before Stonewall and an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam war.

Peter Dale Scott continues in this line. His Minding the Darkness completes a trilogy of book-length poems begun by Coming to Jakarta (1988) and Listening to the Candle (1992). The trilogy's title, Seculum (Latin for "age" or "generation"), suggests its congruence with Pound's definition of epic as "a poem that includes history." Like the Cantos, Seculum is about the manifold ways in which the past gave birth to the present. Scott writes of his parents, his education, his careers as a diplomat and an academic; he frequently, and with the naturalness and grace only a lifetime's acquaintance gives, invokes our cultural past, especially poetry, from Homer and Virgil and Dante to Yeats, Pound, Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney. He writes most often and urgently about the terrible passages of the cold war era - the fall of Sukarno in Indonesia, the war in Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, the long arm of the CIA - and their later reverberations in "the bombing of the World Trade Center / the slaughters in Sarajevo."

Given the titles of Scott's prose books (Cocaine Politics, The Iran-Contra Connection, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK) and the presence on this book's cover of the mysterious obverse of the U.S. Great Seal (that haloed eye hovering over a truncated pyramid), a casual browser could be forgiven for suspecting Scott of being a conspiracy theorist of a depressingly familiar type. Too, too like Pound, one might think, Pound having based most of his own epic on the fear that every wrong in the world came from lending money at interest (hence the foaming anti-Semitism of his radio broadcasts). The crucial difference is that Scott has the background (son of a Canadian politician, when young he was acquainted with, for example, the Dulles family), the experience (as a member of Canada's diplomatic corps in the 1950s, he served in Poland and the U.N.), and the research (Minding the Darkness has a 16-page bibliography) to lend weight to even his most startling claims and so justify his "perverse obsession// with the world's perversities of power."

Poetry like Scott's necessarily walks the narrow line between the prophetic and the preachy. It is somewhat ungracious of him to point out that "you could lay prize-winning volumes/of poetry from here to Walnut Creek//and in how many of them/could you find the seminal words/dfs or debt exposure//or even cia"; it is somewhat unfair to Elizabeth Bishop to praise her ability to see and describe "the millions of quartz grains on the beach" and then immediately blame her for the blindness of her support for the 1964 coup that brought military dictatorship to Brazil. But Scott is surely right to insist that "there are times when the most novel/act of creativity//is to aim at the simple truth," and he seems all the more credible in that he understands his own limitations: "truth emerges/from letting go/of the need for poetic Truth." Scott can not only...