Milton Kessler

Milton Kessler (1930 Brooklyn - 2000) was a poet and an English professor at Binghamton University. He was one of the founders of the university's Creative Writing Program.

Life

Kessler grew up in New York City in a Jewish family. He was a volunteer spear carrier and prop boy at the New York Metropolitan Opera as a teenager, and he had classical training as a singer. He worked selling cloth at the Sample Shop as a young adult, and he married his wife, Sonia, while working a range of modest jobs.[1]

His first book, Sailing Too Far, was published by Harper & Row and became widely noted. He signed an anti-war letter to The New York Review of Books.[2]

He attended graduate school at Harvard University, but after finding enough success as a poet he left doctoral studies and landed at Binghamton University, where his students included Camille Paglia (1964-1968). Paglia later wrote that the biggest impact on her thinking were the classes taught by poet Milton Kessler:

The way I was trained to read literature by Milton Kessler (at Harpur College, part of Binghamton University), who was a student of Theodore Roethke, he believed in the responsiveness of the body, and of the activation of the senses to literature. And oh did I believe in that. Probably from my Italian background -- that’s the way we respond to things, with our body. From Michelangelo, Bernini, there’s this whole florid physicality leading right down to the Grand Opera, the great arias.[3]

His work appeared in Oregon Literary Review,[4] The Nation,[5]

Illness

Kessler had a brief bout with thyroid cancer, an affliction he shared with poet Paul Blackburn. Boarding a bus after a visit to Binghamton, Blackburn told Kessler, "How warm to share a common disease." Blackburn died not long after.

After Kessler's death, Binghamton University established a poetry award in his honor, the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry.[6]

Works

  • "Zero". The Los Angeles Times. September 2, 1990.

Books

  • Free Concert: New and Selected Poems. Etruscan Press. 2002. ISBN 978-0-9718228-4-9.
  • Riding first car: learning the boxes. Black Bird Press. 1995. (Chapbook)
  • The Grand Concourse. State University of New York at Binghamton. 1990. ISBN 978-0-938621-02-7.
  • Sailing Too Far. Harper & Row. 1973. ISBN 978-0-06-012354-3.
  • Woodlawn North. Illustrator Robert Ernst Marx. Impressions Workshop. 1970. ISBN 0-932052-68-1.
  • Called home: a sequence of poems : 1964-66. The Black Bird Press. 1967. (Chapbook)
  • A Road Came Once. Ohio State University Press. 1963.

Anthologies

  • Heather McHugh, David Lehman, eds. (2007). "Comma of God". The Best American Poetry 2007. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-9972-5.
  • Liz Rosenberg, ed. (1996). The invisible ladder: an anthology of contemporary American poems for young readers. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-8050-3836-1.

References

  1. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-11-08. Retrieved 2009-08-22.
  2. ↑ "Poet Power". The New York Review of Books. August 22, 1968.
  3. ↑ "An Interview with Camille Paglia," Bookslut, April 2005
  4. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-09-08. Retrieved 2009-08-22.
  5. ↑ http://www.since1865.com/archive/search.mhtml?query1=DE%20%22KESSLER%2C%20Milton%22
  6. ↑ "The Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry", Harpur Palate Archived 2008-01-31 at the Wayback Machine.


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