A Scholar’s Debut

     I have fond feelings toward my essay on Mechthild von Magdeburg. My first sustained analysis of a Middle German text, it was published in the Mystics Quarterly, a journal that had once been called the Fourteenth Century Mystics Newsletter (the original title appealed to me, for it gave me a mental picture of some bearded figure with a rope belt slipping a few mimeographed pages through the slot to Julian of Norwich, bringing news of colleagues’ birthdays and most recent visions).
     “Transformation of Convention in Mechthild von Magdeburg” is also the first paper I presented at a professional meeting. I was still taking courses in graduate school when the essay was accepted for the annual Patristic, Medieval, Renaissance Conference at Villanova University near Philadelphia. This seemed a positive sign, as, for my part, I had been deeply ambivalent about scholarship, whereas from their side, the academics doubtless saw much in what must have looked like my gypsy’s history to give them pause. We had decided to take a chance on each other, and now it seemed that perhaps it might work out.
     I decided that, since it seemed I might be on the point of acceding to the bourgeoisie after years of poverty, I should buy a new suit. The fact is, though I had spent whole years wearing almost nothing but blue jeans, I never taught without a coat and tie. I had a considerable collection of ill-fitting suits from the Salvation Army and dozens of antique ties with patterns I liked but which unfortunately had been made to end about the middle of the wearer’s chest when knotted properly. These served me well enough for the unlikely teaching positions I had held, but I decided my scholar’s debut required something grander.
     Taking advantage of a sale at the Iowa City Montgomery Ward, I purchased a two-vent three-piece navy pinstripe suit with alterations-to-fit. Or that was the idea at any rate. As I recall my unseemly bicyclist’s thighs stretched the fabric from the day the man was running tape measures over me. The upper elements which felt a bit snug at first, seemed to shrink rapidly. Nonetheless, I felt I could make a proper impression in this suit.
     My initial visual impact was threatened, however. Part of my eternal youth has been periodic manifestations of adult acne, and, rather like some teen’s prom nightmare, a sizable lesion appeared on my left cheek, giving my countenance a spot of unsettling roseate glow. I was building toward some sort of crescendo, but it was yet uncertain if it was to be dreadful or revelatory.
     With my graduate student’s income deep beneath the poverty level, I ground my teeth at conference registration fees and eschewed hotels. An acquaintance at the Friends’ Meeting gave me the number of a relative who was rehabbing a building in West Philadelphia. It may have been the presumptive virtue of the Quaker connection, but this person whom I had never met (and never did) sent a key and an invitation to sleep on the floor of a vacant apartment. I managed to buy a cheap ticket from Chicago, and my arrangements were complete.
     With the bus from the airport and the Main Line train, I made my way to Villanova where the meeting was in session. I attended panels faithfully, hearing, as one always does, some critics who put one in mind of Swift’s “projectors,” and others who provided occasional flashes of wit or insight. In my new suit, I felt quite at home. Even the alarming phenomenon on my cheek was subsiding.
     After returning to the city center late at night, I took the elevated train line to the West Side. Unfamiliar with the city, I overshot my destination by a stop or two and found myself, shortly after midnight, resplendent in my suit, carrying the large, old-fashioned pre-attaché style briefcase in which I kept papers, toiletries, and underwear alike, down the middle of the Friday night urban African-American business strip. I walked the twenty blocks or so to the address at which I had aimed, past the loungers outside bars and bodegas to whom I may have seemed a bit of an apparition. Doubtless they thought I had a better reason to be there than in fact I did.
     Fortunately, the key I had been sent worked. I unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor of the empty apartment.
     The next day I returned to the conference and reveled in the semi-medieval ambiance created by the Catholic institution. I was delighted to attend the only panel I have ever witnessed conducted entirely in Latin: papers, questions, even a good deal of the chit-chat afterwards. I heard also about the work which had been going forward for over a hundred years already, the preparation of a critical edition of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto. Not only was Aquinas productive, his books were preserved and copied to such an extent that the editor must consider all-but-countless variant readings and choose the best from hundreds of manuscripts, while noting all the rest. The publishing task was Herculean in its demands. In recent years some chores had been relieved by the analytical advantages of mainframe computers, and the decision had been made that, rather than the ponderous volumes they had been issuing for generations, which possessed gravitas in the extreme. only digital editions would appear in the future. The speaker said that some of the elder monks participating in the project, who had worked their entire lives on earlier volumes as assistant editors and were only just advanced to the point of having a book bearing their own names as editor, were broken-hearted at the change in format. Surely their merciful Lord will be tolerant of such bookish vanity.
     Sunday morning I made my way again to the transit line and out to Villanova. My paper was scheduled for 8:30, the first session of the day. I shared the stage with a professor speaking on an unpublished collection of Florentine lay sermons, and another dealing with the fourteenth canto of Immanuel of Rome’s Mahberoth. Scattered about the front rows of a sizable lecture hall half a dozen scholars had got their faces washed and their coffee down in time to catch my debut. Or they were faithful friends (or underlings) of one of the other speakers. Several were loath to break off their exchanges of gossip. They probably see each other every year at PMR and never at any other time and each likes it that way, or at least that is how they looked to me as I entered. I was pleased enough with my work and no one else there had even read my author (as I in turn had never seen a page of Immanuel of Rome), so there could be no difficult questions, and I had a reasonably good time delivering my ideas on Mechthild. A couple of my listeners lingered to discuss related issues with me, and I felt as though I had earned an honorable position among the mandarins, all my youthful anti-academic prejudices conveniently invisible if persistent.
     A week or so later I was elated to receive a note from one of the people with whom I had chatted. He was editing a book of selected papers from the conference and wished to include mine. I immediately sent him a revision, but, sad to say, I never heard from him again in spite of an inquiry. Ah well, each of us savants had gained a line on the c.v.

A Brief Literary Life

Brief bio, strictly the facts.


     William Seaton was born August 13, 1946 in Sioux City. His parents were both from rural Iowa. His father, a lawyer, worked for Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., ending his career as general counsel. His mother, a schoolteacher with a M.S. in counseling, encouraged her children’s education.
     His family moved to Glen Ellyn near Chicago in 1954 where he attended public schools, graduating a year before his class in 1963. Reading the classics from an early age, he was also influenced by the Beats and by Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960, which provided small press addresses through which even a suburban lad might obtain the poetry of his own American moment. During high school he also attended Paul Carroll’s Big Table reading series at Second City in Chicago. An Edmund J. James Scholar, he graduated from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1967 with a major in English and minors in Classical Greek and German. His senior honors thesis was on Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno.
     During his undergraduate years he read his poetry in local venues and published in the “hip” issue of Oblique edited by Michael Holloway. He also read his poetry in local and college venues and appeared in a number of “happenings,” including one directed by dancer Terry Temener and another by John Cage.
     During the six years following his graduation, Seaton traveled for nine months in Europe and Africa, crossed the USA a number of times, spending time in the Haight-Ashbury (including during the summer of ’67), worked as a VISTA volunteer in Chicago and Minneapolis and as an editor for Scott, Foresman (producing three years of the ACE English series). He also enrolled twice in graduate school only to withdraw, though not before study in the University of Iowa Translation Workshop under Anselm Hollo and Stavros Deligiorgis.
      In the spring of 1973 he returned to the Haight in San Francisco where he read widely at such venues as the Intersection, the Mediterraneum, the Starry Plough, and Project Artaud. With Artful Goodtimes he produced the Wordriver event at the Blue Dolphin performance space. Goodtimes introduced him to Kush who had come to the city from New York to found Cloud House, a poetry storefront. Cloud House had readings most days, but it was unique in its program of street readings, exhibits of art including words, outreach to North Beach poets of the previous generation, and archives.
   In 1978 he went to Nigeria where he spent a year teaching at Unity School in the hot and steamy bush of the Niger Delta. He then enrolled in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Iowa. Iowa’s program was heavily theoretical and post-structuralist. The student was expected to discuss Derrida, Barthes, and de Man, and only rarely to descend from the empyrean to comment on an actual text. For Seaton, who had eschewed criticism in general, it was an initiation, yet, working under the direction of Stavros Deligiorgis, he eventually produced a thesis on the Transformation of Convention in the Medieval European Love Lyric. During these years he published several scholarly essays, presented many research papers at professional meetings, passed his comprehensive examinations (including one on “all English poetry from Old English to the present”), yet failed to defend his dissertation successfully.
     His artistic activity in Iowa City included producing Words in the Air for the university’s cable station and participating in several experimental events, including outdoor performances and a late-night Electronic Poetry Shotgun (also on cable television).
     In 1985 he accepted a position as medievalist at Long Island University in Brooklyn, though the post was eliminated three years later. He then taught on a one-year appointment at Adelphi University, after which he acquired a leaching certificate and worked in Brooklyn high schools. Since 1992 he has lived in the Hudson Valley where he has taught on adjunct appointments for SUNY New Paltz, SUNY Orange, and other universities. His Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series has presented readings and other events since 1993. In 2009 he was a founder of the Northeast Poetry Center and its College of Poetry where he continues to teach. He is also active in the Seligmann Center for the Arts where he has presented the two Surreal Cabarets of performance events, the second co-curated by David Horton.
     He reads his work frequently in the Hudson Valley and, within the last decade, in Budapest, Kathmandu, Prague, and London as well. His poetry, translations, and criticism have been widely published in journals, chapbooks, anthologies, and online. His Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems was published in 2008 by FootHills.
     He is the recipient of the Helen Fairall Scholarship Award in Comparative Literature, the Ada Louise Ballard Fellowship in the Humanities, numerous public and private grants, and two Pushcart Prize nominations.

A Library's Commonplaces and Curiosities

     I am afraid that my library will lose its animation no later than its owner. I am uniquely familiar not only with the contents, more or less, of these particular volumes, but with their meaning and history, what tale each tells of my taste and the history of the times. A box of old books is among the most valueless of objects. Yet, during its use, like one’s wardrobe, one’s pantry, or one’s bank records, the library sets forth the little that can remain of an individual consciousness in concrete form behind; it is like other human constructions, a precise and rich vein of data.
     Traces of my library’s beginnings remain – but, wait, it has as well a prehistory, though for this earliest era the artifacts are oral, lost, or legendary. As a child I patronized libraries, and I remember to this day the nook where Walter R. Brooks’ Freddy the Pig books stood in the Sioux City library. Perhaps showing off a bit, I brought Herbert Zim’s child’s book of reptiles to kindergarten and described it as “my favorite book.” Natural history and Indian “lore” (as it was then called) were my favorite subjects apart from fiction. Calling myself a curator, I set up a little museum just inside my dormer window with every available exhibit carefully labeled: arrowhead, petrified wood, turtle shell, British penny. By later elementary school I had developed a taste for science fiction, particularly Judith Merrill’s annual anthologies and a good many less imaginative trips to Mars. (One work I encountered then and relished again only a few years ago is Karel Capek’s War with the Newts.) Detective fiction had its day as well, and I read a certain amount of popular fiction like Auntie Mame and On the Beach, but by my middle school years, my library consisted largely of collections of comics. I must have at one time owned twenty-five Pogo volumes. (This predilection ran smoothly into a collection of Jules Feiffer books starting with Sick, Sick, Sick.)
     These have all been long discarded (though I continue to think Feiffer and, especially, Kelly are first-rate artists). My Pocket Library Poe (25¢) lingered until two years ago when I found a handsome Library of America Poe at a library used book sale and dumped the yellowed volume from which I had so relished “Hopfrog” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” Long gone was the Henrik Willem van Loon Story of Mankind (with his own odd line drawings) and the collection of American short stories that included Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde.” I must have discarded at some point the Signet edition of Joseph Gaer’s How the Great Religions Began from which I learned enough to decide to depict the legendary meeting of Lao Tzu and Confucius inside a shoebox when my sixth-grade teacher asked each student to picture a historic event.
     Am I alone is thinking that, while I could discard either a few of my books or nearly all, I would find it very difficult to accept any loss between? Though I moved about a good deal, especially in my younger years, I often moved nothing but books and artworks, along with a few brooms and some old clothes. The only time I sacrificed a significant quantity of books was when heading to Nigeria to teach thirty years ago. At that time I shed not only the greater share of my library (including many books whose loss I later lamented) but also periodicals: Poetry magazine, Evergreen Reviews, a complete set of the first five years of the New York Review of Books. I am wise enough to confess that with Shakespeare and Homer and Chaucer and perhaps a copy of Middlemarch one could be worthily occupied for a good while. Though free of the wish to accumulate other possessions, I have not rid myself of the wish to read everything.
     My voracity may have given my good parents pause during my teen years. Though quite frugal about most everything – I never saw the inside of a motel room until I was in high school as we always camped on vacation – they were extraordinarily permissive about books. My mother was a teacher and set a high value on education; my father, a businessman trained as a lawyer, understood, and my brother and I were given credit cards for Kroch’s and Brentano’s which then billed itself as “the world’s largest bookstore” but which went of business during the 90s. There the left half of spacious basement floor was devoted to quality paperbacks.
     It was the golden age of literary paperbacks. As far as I was concerned, that basement held the glories of world culture. There were the Signets with splashy art and poor glue, the more substantial Anchor books with the marvelously well-designed covers (including some by Gorey), Alvin Lustig’s avant-garde black and white designs for New Directions. The habitual reader came to love as well the understatement of the old Penguins with their color-coded border that trusted to the title and a small and simple black and white image. (The same trust in their materials appeared in the Dolphins with the recognizable swoop of understated color and minimal art or the even sparer Scribner’s with only author and title.)
     With every visit to Kroch’s I would return home with a stack to place at the head of my WWII surplus bunk bed. I often read simply from the top to the bottom of the stack. My habits have changed but little. Because I found them at the library book sale during a few days ago, the last three books I have read are Disraeli’s Sybil, Kafka’s Amerika, and Auden’s Forewords and Afterwords. (I have since picked Liu Hsieh’s The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons off my shelf where it had sat untouched for a decade, but that was chasing after a particular strain of information.) So my reading, like my life, has been desultory, a matter of blind reckoning, as I once termed it, and I can only make the most of it. I have almost never purchased new works, least of all abstruse works, always impossibly expensive. The topics that I studied most intently I know only from library volumes, but I know them none the less for that.
     I promised the reader a few curiosities. Far from being a collector, I have very rarely bought new books at all. Limiting oneself not only to used but to cheap used imposes a salutary discipline on the reader, just as shopping for shirts in the Salvation Army, the buyer’s currency is not cash but taste. To wade through the heaps and keep vision fresh for the attractive is a skill.
     Though no bibliophile I have happened on a few rarities, for the most part in thrift stores and emporia offering any book for a buck. I have all five of Paul Carroll’s Big Table journals, beginning with the one featuring Kerouac, Burroughs, and Dahlberg that was banned by the University of Chicago and their Review. (At one time these appeared now and then in Chicago used bookstores and I used to buy them to give them to people who would appreciate their art and historical importance.) I have a copy of Robert Creeley’s Jargon 33 chapbook A Form of Women (1959) in which the poet was generous enough to inscribe some kind words some decades after I had paid 75¢ for the book with the haunting cover. I have also the 1937 New Directions annual which I spotted in the Champaign-Urbana Salvation Army in 1965. It stood next to the 1938 edition, but my friend and fellow-writer Al Davis had his hands on that one. In a dusty Chicago shop, I spotted Kenneth Patchen’s An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air in a fine 1945 Untide Press limited edition and still it consorts with half a dozen or so of his books in the black and white New Directions covers. One of the few books that came to me new since childhood is the very fine Trianon Press facsimile of Blake’s Songs of Innocence. For Christmas of 1966 my parents asked what book they might buy me and this was my choice and I still protect it in the mailing box addressed to my student apartment.
      What would even these curiosae mean to a new owner? They would undergo some metempsychosis, I suppose, as they did indeed when they arrived in my hands, some bearing among their leaves traces of earlier lives. And a wealth of palpable books! Their implications end not even in sleep.