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.  CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)
• Liz Rosenberg, ed. (1996). The invisible ladder: an anthology of contemporary American poems for young readers. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-8050-3836-1. 

References