Milton Kessler


Milton Kessler 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.
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.
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. 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, 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.

His work appeared in Oregon Literary Review, The Nation,

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.

Works

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