Help Peter Dale Scott with publishing costs

Peter Dale Scott is a poet, political researcher and former Canadian diplomat whose books include The Road to 9/11, The American Deep State, and Seculum, a trilogy of book-length poems -- Coming To Jakarta, Listening To The Candle, and Minding The Darkness -- that poet and critic John Peck called "one of the essential long poems of the past half century."

At 94 years of age, Peter is finalizing two new books, to be published through Rowman & Littlefield, that he considers to be the most important he's yet written. However, he's facing licensing fees and indexing costs he's unable to meet on his limited pension. (On top of unexpected medical bills for three recent hospitalizations due to COVID and pneumonia.)

Please help him meet these costs.

The two books are:

Ecstatic Pessimist: Czeslaw Milosz, Poet of Catastrophe and Hope, which would be the first recent general analysis of the life, writings, and “unpolitical politics” of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz intended for English readers.

Cultural Re-Enchantment: A Post-Secular Poem in Prose, which argues that the current American and global post-Enlightenment mentality is reaching a point of violent and radical disruption, and that, like past mentalities, it needs correction by rethinking and recovering its healthy origins in our collective cultural evolution (ethogeny) through past creative disruptions.

Among the messages in support of these books:

"[Ecstatic Pessimist is] a brilliant and illuminating book on the complex and essential poet.”

-- Robert Hass, a former U.S. Poet Laureate and Milosz’s principle translator.

“I IMMENSELY enjoyed [Cultural Re-Enchantment], and was instructed by it…. Your book MUST be published. Humanity demands it. That sounds grandiose, but in fact it is simply true.”

-- Charles Taylor, philosopher and professor of philosophy, McGill University, winner of the Kyoto Prize, Templeton Prize, Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and John W. Kluge Prize.

“I’ve been reading through [Cultural Re-Enchantment] with much pleasure and profit. Its poetic vision is so grand I could wish you were doing it in verse--but it often feels anyhow like the high language proper to verse. What you have written is magnificent in itself and we hope influential in the world.”

-- Gordon Teskey, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, Harvard University, author of Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity.

Update (3/1/2023): The initial goal of this campaign only covered a portion of the total estimated permissions and indexing costs -- and was met! (Many thanks to all who have contributed.) So I've increased it to what Peter estimates the total cost for both books will eventually be.

I'm Freeman Ng, a former student of Peter's and his collaborator on the book Poetry And Terror: Politics and Poetics in Coming To Jakarta.