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

Books

Anthologies

References

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