Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror.

NY: New Directions (1989). First trade paperback edition. 160 pp. Trivial soiling to fore-edge, else near fine in wrappers. This is the first installment of Scott’s trilogy of documentary long poems exploring the intersection between the act of writing, autobiography, and global politics and violence. A former Canadian diplomat, Scott, now a scholar at UC Berkeley, is particularly well-suited for this task, and the poem is a stunning virtuoso collage of memory, violence, and the necessity of the mediating power of artifice. A letter from publisher James Laughlin to Stanford scholar Albery Gelpi is laid in.