I received an email from Ron Silliman telling me that Peter Seaton died last month on May 18, 2010, of an apparent heart attack.
Peter Seaton and I met at City College (CCNY) in 1960 or 1961, when we were freshmen or sophomores. He was born on December 16, 1942. We spent many, many fascinating hours together discussing literature and reading each others writing throughout our college days. Peter's appearance changed little over the years. He had short, close cropped light brown curly hair, which later became gray. He wore glasses, frequently sunglasses or glasses with clear plastic frames through which you could invariably observe twinkling eyes, often a dark brown henley t-shirt and light tan corduroys, and though short in stature he had a distinctive walk, a rolling gait that sometimes reminded me of a sailor. Peter was a terrific marathon one-on-one conversationalist, a mordant, literary wit of the Holden Caulfield variety, an indefatigable reader who loved to endlessly talk and search for books and new ideas. This, combined with the fact that he was among the most private and secretive persons I have ever known, added immeasurably to the quality of mystery that surrounded both his presence and his absence. Other than the fact that he attended boarding school, he spoke little about his early life. One of his first short stories that may have been written for a writing class we took together was of a character obsessed with going out into the city on an inexplicable, lonely search for a certain hard to find poster. Our interests and directions concerning poetry and poetics remained parallel after graduation in 1964, often attending readings together at St Mark’s, reading The World magazine and other poetry magazines and discussing them avidly, through to the establishment of This magazine, and L=A magazine, up to the early 80’s. During the opening and middle years of Language poetry many of Peter Seaton’s long prose poems were published, widely read and influential. Peter and I did some writing collaborations and even some film experiments together in the late 60’s and early 70’s (we were then both big fans of Stan Brakhage) although these may now be lost or hard to locate. I may still have one or two letters or postcards that he wrote to me when I was living for awhile in Italy and Morocco in the late 60’s. It was he that told me that Bernadette Mayer, whose work we both greatly admired, was giving an open workshop at the Poetry Project in 1973. He always encouraged me in my writing and collage productions particularly, explaining to me that he was knowledgeable about this because his mother had once run an art gallery. I am sorry to say that we lost touch with each other in the early 80’s. Peter’s writing and poetry and his penetrating insights into poetry, culture, technology, language and life were of constant interest to me during our many years of close friendship in the 60's and 70's.
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Penn Sound Obit
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Wikipedia page-Peter Seaton
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Peter Seaton Community Facebook Page
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Eclipse Author Index, including three complete books by Peter Seaton Eclipse
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