B798-KPG2

Review of William Seaton’s Spoor of Desire

Copyright © by Kirpal Gordon, 4/16/09

Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems by William Seaton; FootHills Publishing, Kanona, NY, ISBN 978-0-941053-47-199 pages, 2008, $16.00

  Lovers of poetry have come to William Seaton’s work in a variety of ways over the last forty years: with the Cloud House poets in San Francisco in the ‘70s; with his radio series, Poetry for the People, & his television show, Words in the Air, in the ‘80s; or with his long-running Poetry on the Loose that he produces in the mid-Hudson Valley, now in its sixteenth year.  Others have found him through his translations of Greek, Latin & German poets, as ancient as Sappho & as contemporary as Dada.  Others know him as an inspired teacher of the craft or as a captivating performer.  

  For those who know only a spoke or two of Seaton’s talent, Spoor of Desire is a great introduction to his work, a journey to the center of the wheel.   But for readers already familiar with his chapbooks, Cold Water (Goshen: Monkey’s Press, ‘99) & Tourist Snapshots (Berkeley: CC Marimbo, ‘07), his work in journals like Home Planet News, Outlet, 4 X 4, PoetryBay, Mad Blood, Heaven Bone, Fertile Ground or in anthologies like CAPS Voices, Will Work for Peace, Hudson Valley Poets Fest & Riverine, Spoor is a long-awaited pleasure.   

  In fact, the seventy-two selected poems & prose pieces in Spoor demonstrate a most pleasurable 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 & free verse; a combination shaman-classics scholar equally absorbed in the Vedas & the Tao as well as the pre-Socratics, Plato & Aristotle, Augustine & Aquinas; a sympathetic & original voice, engaged & curious about the world within the world around him. 

  Read in the quiet of one’s study or while on the road in some far-away province, Seaton bids one entrance into a deeper event, a fuller participation, an enlarged appreciation.  That Whitmanic impulse---to move beyond the words of the learn’d astronomer, to sing the body electric to the stars, to join what has been rent by containing in one’s own self multitudes, to initiate the democratic vista---is fully alive in these pages.  Seaton writes in the title piece, “As the bloodhound knows, each spoor is a unique track, bearing for a time a unique scent.”

  Whether a caterpillar or a white church on Paros, the market at Marrakech or Florida’s panhandle; a freshly mowed lawn, the road to Benin or Salvation army stores; a bird’s mask, Elgin marble, three luminous slugs in his garden, Prague or a pinball machine; Nigerian roadsigns, a pelican in Boca de Tomatlan, the Dobo guesthouse in the shadow of a castle, a dead woodpecker at the back door, a carrot or a grapefruit---wherever his sight strikes, Seaton makes of the poem a portal.  By way of image, allusion & invocation, events in the present tense are gleaned through the lens of antiquity as he teases out from the quotidian pastiche hidden clues that reveal an ancient way or rite of passage, an underground river running below us.   Like this untitled poem-song/prayer-flag/ritual-ceremony from his section, “Neopastoral Texts,” with its last line shouted out of a Mystery cult:

My fat grape eyes can hardly bear the sight

Of tress so brimming full of autumn death.

Their red and orange light the country road.

What prodigal electric discharge here!

At home tomatoes swell and burst their skins

(hopped up with hybrid genes) and on the road

a deer’s leg, a dead mouse in the backyard.

“Mists and mellow fruitfulness” be damned!

The cat shit on the bed last night.  It stinks

So full and rich a smell it fills the house.

The conflagration’s here and at the end

Of things is glory.  Hail the flight

Beyond when things leap chuteless into flame,

For Dionysus Lysios is skipper now!

  That killer first couplet of welcome, the mad momentum it makes & its graped-eyed reminder that its author is part of the libation & celebration!   It’s all downhill from there with the ease of falling leaves in “prodigal electric discharge” around these smooth-talkin’ lines, how the rhythm of syllables stressed & unstressed tumble out from the cave of the mouth effortlessly---as Ramakrishna said of death, “Like taking off a tight shoe.”   What a way to welcome autumn, a ripening that bursts open the skin, a rehearsal for eternity.

  Seaton, reminiscent at times of Kenneth Rexroth (& the Pound of Personae), delivers lines of incredible compression & imagistic precision.   But it’s his ear for the exact sound, pitch, meter, nuance & balance of a word, tuned to its assonance & consonance, aware of its innate shape in the mouth & its size on the page that drives these lines of buddha nature winking into everlasting rhythm the cadence of wonder.  

Cats’ Eyes

intent as a falling plumb,

grand with gravitas, lighter than air,

yellow like hip swampwater,

light glances there and plays

like dervishes on holiday

instant calculus dwells there

nailed by cat’s eye shine from tenebrous parlor

shamed by that dead certainty

galaxies float there and worlds collide

and fugues play out

in the drift and settle of days and needs
  There is indeed (colliding) world enough & time “in the drift and settle of days and needs” to be lulled into the deep silence the poem travels in & offers to us.  It’s full of charm & craft!  On the one hand, yes: it’s his eye to the right detail, what Eliot called the objective correlative, the image that turns the image-making machinery in the brain; but on the other hand, it’s his ear to sound, the haunt of the lyric & its whisper of the ancient world that makes these images unfold in musical time.  No doubt it’s one thing, not two: eye & ear.  Like Rexroth & ol’ Ez, Seaton has learned from the Chinese.

  Here’s “Kasyapa’s Flower,” with its epigraph, “When one knows what that staff is, one’s study of Zen comes to an end” from Hui-leng:

Dragonfly ampule,

throat of a breeze,

autolights nervous in daylight,

pool of melody, a crow’s call

wakens the crows of the cranium,

sortilege in the Milky Way,

rolling like water downward,

impelled toward the next

Niagra of glances,

     shooting pains,

            & Morpheus’ caress.

  The treasure of pleasure is in the sheer delight of song, but Seaton masterfully contrasts shifts in size: the “Niagra of glances” alongside “Morpheus’ caress”; “the crows of the cranium, sortilege in the Milky Way.” 

  Like a Chinese scholar’s garden, his song-canvas walks & talks us from yin to yang, micro to macro, water to rock, indoors to outdoors, & back again.  With a wry humor he poignantly counterpoints human plight against vast space.  As he reminds us in another context, “It’s cold out there: in the nighttime field, in the ocean, between the galaxies.”  All the more reason to travel a path of the heart, as the old timers say, & with a song to counter any misfortune:

A shadow of disquiet

supports the glaring snow;

an odor of illness

plays about the edge

            of the sea of air;

            anticipation of the ache of longing

                        in love’s tight grip;

            black holes in the cosmos

                        of consciousness, too.

            How so unwieldy,

                        This old, old warp and woof?

  Yes, it’s certainly a poem but it’s also a prayer.  With his long-lobed ear pitched to “the ache of longing” & his eye to the original integrity behind alleged opposites, he renews to the office of poetry its oral & oracular aspect.  Like Kabir & the poets in the Adi Granth of the Sikh tradition, Seaton smiths songs that, through the repetition of the lyrics aloud, create the experience the lyrics celebrate.   In India it’s known as shabad or laya yoga, divine union through the art & science of vibrating the sound current.  It’s a blend of raga (musical mood) & verse lines whose permutation & combination of certain seed syllables has the tongue tip striking meridian points along the roof of the mouth in rhythmic patters to awaken the “divine receptors” (the pineal & pituitary glands & hypothalamus) not just in the singer but in the listener. 

  It’s the poet’s original contribution to the human tribe & in India the practice is as old as the Vedas, & they’re the oldest poem-prayer-invocation-incantation-songs recorded in human history.  The mark, one might say, of excellence in such a project is the actual change it brings in our consciousness.  Not only does Seaton celebrate the older story shining through the new one du jour, he crafts words that the mouth loves to repeat in language that is pure candylandy.  For example:

Since certainty shattered so long ago

we live among glittering shards,

each husk lit with shock from that old blast.

Thread these to truth’s needle:

a coleus shaken and wary, looks this way and that,

creeps blind looking for some way out,

each leaf like subtle radar or cats’ ears

turning this way and that

seeking some dream of a main chance;

a book whose text does twist and dance

and squirm to find itself thus stranded here,

like me, a cast-up hulk on this damp and sandy shore.

And in the corner some nameless dust

a gleam of sparkle there from distant galaxies,

a winking from its inner soul of subatomic glee.

  Listen to the music of his first three lines for the real story.  Nothing against all the revealed, infallible & absolute truths we must believe in under penalty of death, but never has uncertainty seemed more the actual ruler of what we know, nor humility a more appropriate response to our human condition, nor “a cast-up hulk on this damp and sandy shore” more the voice to remind us it’s a weave of large & small, of ‘as above, so below.’   Seaton threads us through light & shade, star & sea, book & plant via the repetition of “this way and that,” a dance of antenna leading to that Yeats-like, Second Coming ending in the last three lines, the spinning of proportion.

  Lest the reader be misled that Seaton only stays clothed in awe & at-one-ment, his portrait of a subway ride (“Did ever any people move / so silently to work?”) makes a most familiar subject new by his idiosyncratic gaze.   Not since Wings of Desire opened with Rilke’s angels giving witness to the commuters’ thoughts has this reviewer felt underground travel so well sized up as in these Seaton lines: “The routine here outweighs the car! / No desperation but an aimlessness, / a terrible blooming of dead ends, / solitary luxuries, lonely sufficiencies . . . in this morning number two subway car / from Flatbush on its way to Manhattan.”  His quick read & wit keep one at the edge of one’s seat, never sure when an expectation he creates will hit paydirt or turn into a reversal. 

  In fact, for all the kudos bestowed for his musical imagism, it’s when Seaton travels, especially to far-off lands, that his poems take on an even more immediate quality & depth.  For one thing, his sketch style is enriched by the layers of history.   For another, his scholarship is not academic or pedantic but Whitmanic & human, based upon his actual interest in the people he encounters.  The past becomes prologue for this world citizen informed by the de-colonization of his own mind.  With a willingness that knows no borders, ever-ready to go native no matter the flora or fauna, he’s Father Walt’s wild child, the whole enchilada, the antithesis of the gringo besieged by hygiene issues & the Other.   These are the words that end the book:

  “As we sit in a hut with walls of fronds, we eat the meat with mint tea and round leaves. White and whole wheat, while drummers and string puckers perform keening warbling heartsongs and great rough clouds of smoke from cookfires that have smoldered for centuries drift through this new and temporary Eden.”

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