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 passing, Binghamton University established a poetry award in his honor, the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry.^[6]

Works

• "Zero". The Los Angeles Times. September 02, 1990. http://articles.latimes.com/1990-09-02/books/bk-1957_1_milton-kessler. 

Books

• Free Concert: New and Selected Poems. Etruscan Press. 2002. ISBN 9780971822849. 
• Riding first car: learning the boxes. Black Bird Press. 1995.  (Chapbook)
• The Grand Concourse. State University of New York at Binghamton. 1990. ISBN 9780938621027. 
• Sailing Too Far. Harper & Row. 1973. ISBN 9780060123543. 
• Woodlawn North. Illustrator Robert Ernst Marx. Impressions Workshop. 1970. ISBN 0932052681. 
• 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, ed (2007). "Comma of God". The Best American Poetry 2007. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9780743299725. http://books.google.com/?id=kH6s4FbzzPAC&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=Milton+Kessler&q=Milton%20Kessler. 
• Liz Rosenberg, ed (1996). The invisible ladder: an anthology of contemporary American poems for young readers. Macmillan. ISBN 9780805038361. http://books.google.com/?id=OtrvXaul2rAC&pg=PT96&dq=Milton+Kessler#v=onepage&q=Milton%20Kessler. 

References

1. ^ http://harpur.binghamton.edu/hotline/2000/may22/index.htm
2. ^ "Poet Power". The New York Review of Books. August 22, 1968. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11584. 
3. ^ "An Interview with Camille Paglia," Bookslut, April 2005
4. ^ http://orelitrev.startlogic.com/v2n2/OregonLiteraryReview.htm
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

Persondata
Name	Kessler, Milton
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Date of birth	1930
Place of birth
Date of death	2000
Place of death