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| photo of William Seaton by Dan Wilcox |
Rubee Rancourt: Giant Steps Press has just
published your new book of poems, Planetary Motions. Would you to share
what inspired you to become a writer and how your academic experience
influenced your voice as an author?
William Seaton: Ah well, I was inspired by the
poetry of Freddy the Pig in Walter R. Brooks’ children’s books and the
scintillating display of the playful potential of words in Walt Kelly’s Pogo
comic strips. As a child I passed a bit
of time with the likes of Ogden Nash and Robert Service, but I was interested
in everything then including the sciences.
By middle school I had decided that the likeliest professions I might
follow were religious mystic (I loved the Evelyn Underhill books), socialist
revolutionary (on the model of the Wobblies), or poet. I suppose I selected the most practical
choice of the three.
Just as I was approaching
adolescence, the Beat writers were attracting attention even from those who
never read a word of their writing, and by the time I was in high school I was attending
Paul Carroll’s Big Table readings at Second City in Chicago. Then followed the hip youth movement of the
sixties when I went to the Haight-Ashbury in the days when we wanted not only
to write great poetry but also to transform society. We declaimed poetry in the streets and strove
to make each act of daily life into art.
As for academe, some may conceive the
ivied halls as an isolated and remote realm, but for me it opened up the globe
and the centuries past. I spent an
absurd amount of time living on pennies in graduate school, but that allowed me
to study many languages, dead and alive, and to feast on the broadest variety
of writing while living on scholarships, fellowships, and assistantships.
The traditional canon is not,
however, sufficient. To learn the real
nature of literature requires familiarity with work outside the English
Literature curriculum. To know what
poetry can do one must know not only Keats, but Du Fu and Kalidasa and blues
songs and anthropological reports of oral texts.
I did not always fit in. When I showed some Sappho translations to my
Greek professor and asked his opinion. he said that he could not comment as he
really cared little for poetry. In the
most advanced Classics seminars we never did more than translate, construe, and
note unusual forms. I am grateful for
the knowledge gained through historical philology, but my goal was simply to
read poetry.
Rubee Rancourt: You have been able to live what
many consider a nontraditional lifestyle. Taking into account this unique lens
on the world, what would you say has been the most impactful lesson or
experience that has stayed with you throughout your writing career?
William Seaton: My inclination was clear from the
start. I happen to have a college
application essay I wrote ever so long ago.
Probably imprudently, I said nothing about any specific career but
simply said I wished to learn as much as possible and experience as much as
possible. I was quite honest – I
despaired of ever earning a living, so I pursued other goals. Although I led a gypsy career and never made
much money, I cannot complain.
When I graduated from university and
married my dearly beloved, she and I agreed that our first priority, apart from
my evading the draft, was to see the world, so we worked as long as necessary,
living on the super-cheap, and then spent almost a year in Europe and North
Africa. Since then we have traveled all
over and lingered to teach in West Africa.
The experience of seeing up close how other people live, checking out
other cultures’ visions, is really akin to reading which can place your
consciousness suddenly in another gender or country or era. If there is a lesson available, it is
probably “there are many ways to be human.”
Second lesson is “all those ways have a lot in common.”
Rubee Rancourt: One of the many things that I
appreciate about your work is the humor with which you convey deeper messages
to your audience. Where does the inspiration for your humor come from and how
would you say your authorial voice has evolved over the process of writing your
books?
William Seaton: I regret the decay of light
poetry. Poetry today is often passionate
and loud when it isn’t too cool for any affect.
Humor is highly poetic, using multiple meanings, wordplay, and sudden
realizations for effect. Both the
visionary and the comedian depend on poking and sometimes overturning
preconceptions. Looking around in a
slightly pixilated state of mind, leads to goofing in the sense of Philip
Whalen’s Goof Book, looking at the world agog and grinning, recreational
living, one might say. In performance,
the most certain ways to stir an audience are transgressive sexual content,
revolutionary social content, and humor.
The last has, perhaps, the best chance of lasting impact.
Everyone has a unique voice, of
course, and in the case of a writer there is the additional complication that
the mind on the page is mediated by words and cannot be identical to the
thought. Since Shelley: “I fall upon the
thorns of life! I bleed!” lyric poetry has
often been self-dramatization. In Planetary
Motions I have included several kinds of poems I had earlier excluded from
collections as lacking gravitas.
Let multiple voices coexist! I
tend to shrink from the single continuous confessional voice, but language is
such a subtle instrument that the ego always shows up on the page. Think of Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet
who wrote using dozens of personae with different names, styles, and ideas, but
he is still discernably there behind each of them.
Rubee Rancourt: When reading “How to be a Poet” I
was most impressed with the line “Think of when you’ve been highest and lowest
and what the colors of the planets smelled like then.” What would you like
people to take away after reading your books? And what would you say to other
aspiring writers who wish to explore the world of poetry?
William Seaton:
In my opinion writers have no privileged access to reality. All anyone can do is to record flashes of
consciousness accurately enough that the reader might sympathetically see
through the author’s eyes. A precise
description of an experience of the world will be beautiful because people find
humanity, the world, and the cosmos beautiful in the end, terrifying, too, but
beautiful. Somehow in the end even
tragedy and suffering may be redeemed by art.
As the Buddha realized, we cannot alter the conditions of existence, but
we can alter our own minds.
As for advice to aspiring writers, I
would begin with the old prudential cliché “don’t go into the arts unless you
can’t help yourself.” If you do, blessings
upon you. Poetry is a performance skill,
like lifting weights. Regular practice
is the way to improve. Reading and
workshops may play a role, but writing is the way to get better at
writing.
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| photo of William Seaton by Celia Seaton |
