William Seaton is a poet, translator, and critic, the author of Planetary Motions, Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems, Dada Poetry: An Introduction, Tourist Snapshots, and Cold Water.    Active in poetry performance since sixties happenings, he was a member of the San Francisco Cloud House group in the seventies and produced the Words in the Air television show in the eighties and the Poetry on the Loose series in the Hudson Valley for twenty-one years.   He was director of the Northeast Poetry Center for five years and worked on programs of the Seligmann Center for the Arts for seven years, including producing evenings of performance art.  His poetry, influenced by Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, and Paul Blackburn, shows rare concern for sound values.    

Seaton was educated at the University of Illinois and the University of Iowa.  He has taught in rural Nigeria, in New York prisons, and in Bedford-Stuyvesant as well as in universities.