ABOUT

William Seaton is a poet, translator, critic and blogger. He is the author of Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems and Dada Poetry: An Introduction as well as Tourist Snapshots and Cold Water.  His work has appeared in many literary journals (among them Chelsea, Mad Blood, and Maintenant) and anthologies (such as Riverine, Liberty’s Vigil, and Brownstone Poets).  He has read his poetry widely in New York and California as well as in Kathmandu, London, Prague, and Budapest.

Seaton follows Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, and Paul Blackburn in combining the scholarly study of past literature with involvement in contemporary avant-garde practices and grass roots non-academic poetry scenes.  He has long been active in spoken word and mixed media art events beginning with happenings in the sixties and continuing with participation in the Cloud House guerilla poetry group in seventies San Francisco and more recent experimental programs under the title Surreal Cabaret.

He produced the long-running Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series in New York’s Hudson Valley and headed the Northeast Poetry Society’s College of Poetry.  He was associated as well with the Seligmann Center for the Arts where he presented lectures, readings, and a variety of performance art programs. His blog, Poetry on the Loose … Floating on the Ocean of Words, begun in 2009, has over 645 entries on the literary arts. As he makes clear in the blog’s Introduction: “‘On the loose’ is meant to imply an overstepping of boundaries, a flouting of restrictions, a phrase meant to describe my writing, my taste, my sensibility, perhaps my life.” 

Educated in the University of Illinois’ English Department and the University of Iowa’s Comparative Literature Program, he has taught in a variety of settings including Brooklyn, a New York State prison, and the Nigerian bush on levels from preschool through graduate courses. 

Regarding his On Dada Poetry: An Introduction, Padma Thornlyre wrote: “William Seaton’s formidable intellect and healthy irreverence are equal informants to a poetic sensibility subtle and precise but never excessive. He is at once well-grounded in classical sensibilities and open to the imaginative escapades of modernism; the playful enjoining pf the absurd so abundant in his own poetry makes him the perfect translator for Dadaist texts.”

Regarding his Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems, Frank Malley wrote: “It is rare that a poet so passionately and boldly collects so diverse an ‘everything’ as William Seaton does. It is apparent to me that the endless thread of being, from atom to zenobiology, is all enmeshed within the same splendid and sullied web of desire. He is fearless in pursuit of the startling juxtaposition, the arcane perspective, the double-helix twist of the ordinary rules. He boldly links the disparate, and in predominately gentle tones steps beyond the carefully trained analogies and conceits of yesteryear’s poets. His poems are indeed alive in the sea of being, to be hauled bookward, wriggling, resplendent, and sometimes ordinary, in the net he weaves of words. 

PUBLICATION AT GIANT STEPS PRESS

Planetary Motions, poetry and translations, Giant Steps Press, 2020

With Williams-esque brevity and an imagist’s eye that scratches at the glazed windows of surrealism, the musical heart of the Beats that hears the most subtle and wry epiphany present in language, William Seaton winks at his reader from behind a Mona Lisa grin and raises the curtains again and again on crystalline moments in time as held within the deep ocean of his acute symbolic and ironic focus. To follow Seaton is to travel the world as a mendicant reveling in its ordinary mysteries, all connoting and pointing to much deeper perceptions and extraordinary arrivals to both horrific beauty and beatific tragedy. His journey becomes an exodus from deception, with him playing Moses holding the mythical magic rod that shows the way to a real promised land of genuine spiritual vision and true love. —Steven Hirsch

Throughout Planetary Motions—haiku-esque picture postcards from the far away, meditations on the metaphysics of everyday life, translations from the ancients, songs that border on incantations, morality reminders, monologues from surrealist chaplain Lama Swine Toil—William Seaton delivers a combination of talents rare in today’s literary scene: an incantatory incandescence from the Whitman-Pound line-breath lineage; a gifted lyricist in both metered and free verse; a combination shaman/classics scholar equally absorbed in the Vedas and the Tao, the pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas; a sympathetic and original voice, engaged and curious about the world within the world around him. He’s got amazing observation chops, a head for history and an eye for irony, but the music these lines make and the momentum they create is what calls a reader back and back again to their just-so-ness of phrase and sound. He walks with the ancestors. —Kirpal Gordon

William Seaton possesses a poetic voice whose sage and steady delivery comforts yet challenges us simultaneously. Formally trained and accomplished in translating Greek, Latin, German, and French, he has a formidable background firmly entrenched in the history of poetry. His antiquarian references come alive against a soundtrack of contemporary musings that might often be compared to the rhythmic undercurrents of jazz with its roots in both blues and ragtime. It’s an intoxicating blend of melancholy ruminations and playful ebullience that makes jazz so compelling, and this is also true of his poetry. Planetary Motions shows us that Seaton is a true citizen not only of the planet but perhaps of other worlds as well. —Karen Corinne Herceg

William Seaton—poet of simple truth! —Robert Creeley

No matter the form—poem, essay, translation—William Seaton enforces the reality each voice inhabits through his wise, precise word choices, to characterize the profundity of condition humans suffer under, successfully or not, no matter the era. —Randy Fingland

Though Seaton holds to the theory that his poetic ramblings are as subservient to chance as to life, nonetheless he establishes an elegant pattern with this kaleidoscope of words. —Janet Hamill 

OTHER BOOKS

Dada Poetry: An Introduction, Nirala Publications, http://www.niralapublications.com

Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems, Foothills Press, www.foothillspublishing.com, Tourist Snapshots, CC Marimbo