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 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] and 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.CS1 maint: others (link)
  • Called home: a sequence of poems : 1964-66. The Black Bird Press. 1967. (Chapbook)
  • A Road Came Once. Ohio State University Press. 1963.

Anthologies
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References
  1. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-11-08. Retrieved 2009-08-22.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  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.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  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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