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Sailing Too Far: Poems
An anthology of the poetry of Milton Kessler, “…an original poet of great power and a highly tragic, sometimes despairing tone…” (John Crowe Ransom). “Even in the saddest poems the voice of a lyric poet rises and reasserts itself, and the songs and bells keep reappearing…A lyricist capable of lovely and musical effects.” (Elizabeth Bishop).
86 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1973
About the author
Milton Kessler
8 books4 followersA poet of international acclaim, Milton Kessler published five books of poetry during his lifetime, including Free Concert: New and Selected Poems (Etruscan Press). He received numerous awards and distinctions, including a Robert Frost Fellowship, an Edward MacDowell Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment Program Grant. Several years ago, one of his poems, “Thanks Forever,” was chosen to appear in London subway cars to be seen by as many as two million riders a day as part of the “Poems on the Underground” project. Kessler also was a teacher and professor for more than thirty years.
Kessler died in April 2000, leaving behind a manuscript of new work. Free Concert: New and Selected Poems celebrates the life and work of a gifted poet of original voice, collecting work from each of his books together with his new poems.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 5, 2021
If my 20-something self could get mad at my 50-something self, it would probably kick my ass for doing this.
Challenge #1: Read this book.
Challenge #2: Read the following "review."
Challenge #3: Guess the professor's response.
The text below was given to Professor Milton Kessler on August 26, 1992.
My neighbor maroon
windex sprinkles on the shingles—
man-made, a.m. mania.
Mighty Hoover vrooms and brooms,
sucks and sweeps the dead leaves out
("the rooftop gutters missed mom's
ideals of godliness!").
Maroon—this Joe...this schmoe
agitates and irritates
all this bad, early-morning
taste of scrubbèd concrete floor
and bugless water top.
Will sunrise working for this moron
neverever stop?
[end page 2; typed on white paper]
Frost
"Or an old horse."—Stevens's "Nuances of a Theme by Williams"
a queerly singing course
along those same old slimes,
alonely figure-horse,
assumed, affirms cold times.
in snowy night with chimes
it clops its sick'ning feet,
indubitably mimes
its time's methodical beat.
its feet of frost, in peat
and moss, it ever sees
them—ugly, flailing fleet,
three hairy ships it sees.
frostbite has made its frieze
and once again my men
it's time; it's time for trees
that we must slog again.
[end page 3; handwritten on the backside of a printout of
Sean Lucy. "Creative Trinity, or Inside the Literary Triangle." Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 71, no. 282, 1982, pp. 166–177. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30090426. Accessed 5 Jan. 2021.]
One Precise Time; November 27th, 1990: NOW
I had a liver in my nose.
I don't know
what it did, but I don't know what
livers generally do either.
They sit there, blackish
I imagine, and pump or sit or something
and they process or filter or help
some other part of the body.
This little guy looked so weak
upon extrusion that I tossed him away
as far away as possible
from me before anybody saw
that I had had something that
utterly useless inside me.
[end page 4; handwritten on ruled white paper!]
Phallocentric (or: Upon Removing a Deformed, Sperm Shaped Snot)
I
Black prodigious head of course like a penis
With tails licking wiggly from the crater
To my finger which had just been digging digging
Deep to get that festering death: 0ut came.
0ut and 0ut it came from within and was
Pluckt out in the flick of time it took.
II
It could've been something or someone.
It may have developed into another
Thing inside my head as twisted as that
Concept makes itself, I'd have to agree
That the little burger could have been—
Could have been something or someone.
III
My fingers—fragile and crafty though
They think they are, they act accordingly—
According to my will and testament
Proclaim them by their action and actions.
The eye offendest and the eye dislodgest
Itself by doing so. Fingers discover themselves.
IV
Weird, it's weird how its weirdness
Is an ellipse, a familiar look to me,
A looking at me and a looking alikeness.
The tails end somewhere inside
Scarily attached somehow unknown
Clearly enough. Fingers, pluck it pluck it.
[end page 5; typed on clean sheet]
Loosely, bardic women entice their men to be alone.
Allowing for variables and other friction type factors,
I'd have to arrive around late afternoon tomorrow—
that is, if you're willing, accepting and warm.
In other ways you'd calm me by freeing wholely
the leftish half of your brain—make anew, show
true manliness in falling, particulate thineself, sow!
Calling to me, to make me—realize of course I'm
bound to be gagged about the waist with a bulge
you'd necessarily turn sick with sports.
Your atramentous—black—inklike—spirituality falters.
And illegitimately piercing your hovering transcendency,
incapability, I pick lint from your navel, ickily dark.
[end page 6; typed on blue paper, the backside of a cover sheet about Indiana University's graduate studies in English program]
Game of shit.
forced by family to catch his shit,
catch it quickly as he slings it,
the way a shortstop fields hot ones,
snaps his hands into stinging place
to stop those balls or lose his grown ones.
issuing calls from below his belt,
he makes those receivers jangle;
and with his words, entangles emotions,
necessitates notions of flight; flee!
they're not free; they cost too:
his shouts—his costlies—like his shits.
no cups, no jocks, no support, no cover,
trapped in a game the he knows
only shows him that you,
his hereditary lover,
are waried scarily of him.
fear death and sorrow because
tomorrow or today he could charge for breath
and probably will, too, just to show you
that he bought his; why shouldn't you?
if not, his world ends—ends without meaning.
history consoles, "love him, pay him—
or he'll tax your head for goldsies needed,"
because he hates us all but needs us too.
he hates you more, maybe only because
you are to him—but never were—his baby.
[end page 7; typed on pink paper; backside of Wayne State University Satisfactory Progress Policy for Continued Financial Aid Eligibility]
Pyg like me on the Sweetest Day of the Year in America
A bruise on my groin ain't quite a bruise,
it's like a buncha dots o' blood track marks almost:
Adonis's spear, like my own, shoulda broke
before he coulda went down pain inna crotch
like mine now is a ache inna muscles
anna leak inna heart drippin acid on Psyche.
Galatea woulda been huge if ida made'r;
she'da been taller'na statue in our bay
and more masculine too even'ough
she shoulda complemented me like aea
complemented Uranus—the stinky, puckered
old sky god king who couldn't hold a spear
to 'is own son 'n' when 'e did,
he let it foam inna sea and set 'er free
to wreak havoc on me.
His stinkin daughter ain't done me no good
nor her ancienter chubby son.
They bruise my groin and rip my chest.
They infinite wisdom love me to death
and stretch me out on poetry out of breath.
[end page 8; typed on lavender paper; backside of University of Iowa's Master of Arts with Emphasis in Expository Writing program description]
izhusistherissis Moon*
"Let us go then, you and I"
and way up high, it, too,
was lost. A really, really, long
place to go to in a fear-filled night;
soft and bright; overbearing night;
it lit a lot of sky and grassy plain.
Clearly, sifting through other lights
in other, kind an cloudless times
was not a task beyond her means;
nor was she afraid of screaming.
Cold on one side (that we all know)
side is not the way to glow.
Back we go to Hotel Hell
To live among the tuna smell.
And again slimy (and liking it less this time)
and climbing from a sea-bathed craft—
I had made a mess in my pants,
"Back to life from the vacuum of space!
Returned alive from death by suffocation."
Now, though, certain —they are, they are, I tell you—
people and streets and shops and shoes...
Back we go to Hotel Hell
To live among the tuna smell.
Evenin's mistress, you playful,
lovely lady: enticing, entrancing—
alone. Together we've been dancing
*this is a phonetic spelling in american english of how "It's just that there was this..." is said in excited, conversational speech.
[end page 9; typed on clean white paper]
in a self-confined, writhing embrace.
The threat and challenge of more discoveries;
coming home with a first-hand vision of Atlantis...
I have seen Marianas-like depths
where the tension and pressure felt
were not death. I have sneered
at the mirror and the wonderful image there—
the all-knowing fear of Moon;
my distrusts at wanting—. Only a moon
would ever, ever wear a dress.
God! forceful, graceful son!
Please, lord—Christ, my life can not be done.
A meager taste for slender hair—
A need for a wave of such desire—
Faltering faltering...falling hero on fire.
No: I will wring dry my gown—
a firm asbestos garb. And I will frown.
My last words will not be cute
or shiny or "awe" or "beauty" or "smile"—
My last words shout, My My My.
It may exist, but I — a whole — I mean.
Jesus Christ, you are fair.
I have gone in there.
[end page 10; typed on clean white paper]
For your 0nly son
I
In the Winter when the trees have been stripped
of all their leaves, it is all too clear
at night for the little starries to point out
how the backdrop—the falling cliffside behind
the trees—is also barren if not for the trees.
And though a Moon's bright eye shines visibility
onto the snowy bleak scene and passes by,
the dry dirt crumbles—unsatisfactory.
Without trees, without leaves, it is pure dead.
II
There is to be the weeping
Followed by the wake:
Lots of plots of eating cakes
And teas and it is all in vain.
Vanity drives them to this
As Insanity plunged into that
Which was too hard, too empty.
It was too empty hard to miss.
0nly living can discuss
All or any ways he meant to them.
III
Drop a friend in the water and
We—the muffled reflection,
The turds and the vomit,
The blood and the snot,
(Even beside the budding tree
Fed by this stream)
Imperfect replicas of life;
Glorified, ditch-digging failures—
[end page 11; typed on yellow paper; backside of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's list of graduate faculty in the Department of English and Comparative Lit]
Are all that were and are
IV
Nothing complain
Around reasonably fallen leaves
Mistaken Quicken Enliven
Love lives Nothing dies because of you
It lives scrape its own nails
Bleeding walls for
Here are six six of them numbers
Here now
Take it! Use it! Freeze frozen life
"'Sighs and Plants,' I say."
V
Occasional starry nights
are also cloudy ad warm
despite the winds' chills;
Finite pieces of life
are all too much alike
for a love of life to be made
Just like someone;
really, it doesn't matter—
VI
He, he really only knew you.
Unfortunately for you
as well as poorly for he
had forgotten himself
His only only, His only self.
Fear, 0 God; Fear o' God:
There There There 0 god
is there!
[end page 11; typed on white paper; backside of a list of graduate level courses (for Binghamton?)]
He was Super Freeze
among your winter-armèd trees
a loneliness
an emptiness
for such reason
goddamn, DAMN, goddamn season
VII
0 it was read
And made a deeper black than the skin
In his anus
As it, too, was fetid stain.
Read again still
By moving tongue.
Blame in us but never
But blamed by us
VIII
Again, never ending
As always in a new way.
IX
When we are here
And he is not,
We are here
And he
Is N0T
X
You survive him, 0 you loving souls
Though not here now in our words or thoughts,
Though existing independently
Of all such and other things, alone,—0! all
Alone with your excuses and reasons—
Sighing into yourselves, you speak and think of him.
[end page 12; typed on yellow paper; backside of p.3 about U. Wisconsin-Milwaukee's graduate program]
When the dirt and snow fall down upon his
Muddy corpse in a muddy copse of trees
0n a silently shrouded December
Day, he will not cry; he will feel no pain.
He will cease.
0nly we will remain and speak of him.
[end page 13; typed on yellow paper; backside of p.1 about UW-M's graduate program]
Challenge #1: Read this book.
Challenge #2: Read the following "review."
Challenge #3: Guess the professor's response.
The text below was given to Professor Milton Kessler on August 26, 1992.
Prof Kessler:[end page 1; handwritten on backside of neon green handout about SUNY Binghamton's graduate community apartments]
I'm sorry about the messiness of this "portfolio," but I saw little need for total neatness—this is not for class or publication, nor is it guaranteed to get me into the class, so ….
I don't think there's anything I can saytoabout my writing that'll help you appreciate it except that I feel I'm still searching for a consistent voice (to abuse for a while before switching to another). I was once told that I had a "voice" by a poet at a workshop, but the poetry instructors at Wayne State had different opinions about that. I still need lots of work, of course, since I'm only 23. I'm hoping this class and/or the creative writing program could help.
My neighbor maroon
windex sprinkles on the shingles—
man-made, a.m. mania.
Mighty Hoover vrooms and brooms,
sucks and sweeps the dead leaves out
("the rooftop gutters missed mom's
ideals of godliness!").
Maroon—this Joe...this schmoe
agitates and irritates
all this bad, early-morning
taste of scrubbèd concrete floor
and bugless water top.
Will sunrise working for this moron
neverever stop?
[end page 2; typed on white paper]
Frost
"Or an old horse."—Stevens's "Nuances of a Theme by Williams"
a queerly singing course
along those same old slimes,
alonely figure-horse,
assumed, affirms cold times.
in snowy night with chimes
it clops its sick'ning feet,
indubitably mimes
its time's methodical beat.
its feet of frost, in peat
and moss, it ever sees
them—ugly, flailing fleet,
three hairy ships it sees.
frostbite has made its frieze
and once again my men
it's time; it's time for trees
that we must slog again.
[end page 3; handwritten on the backside of a printout of
Sean Lucy. "Creative Trinity, or Inside the Literary Triangle." Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 71, no. 282, 1982, pp. 166–177. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30090426. Accessed 5 Jan. 2021.]
One Precise Time; November 27th, 1990: NOW
I had a liver in my nose.
I don't know
what it did, but I don't know what
livers generally do either.
They sit there, blackish
I imagine, and pump or sit or something
and they process or filter or help
some other part of the body.
This little guy looked so weak
upon extrusion that I tossed him away
as far away as possible
from me before anybody saw
that I had had something that
utterly useless inside me.
[end page 4; handwritten on ruled white paper!]
Phallocentric (or: Upon Removing a Deformed, Sperm Shaped Snot)
I
Black prodigious head of course like a penis
With tails licking wiggly from the crater
To my finger which had just been digging digging
Deep to get that festering death: 0ut came.
0ut and 0ut it came from within and was
Pluckt out in the flick of time it took.
II
It could've been something or someone.
It may have developed into another
Thing inside my head as twisted as that
Concept makes itself, I'd have to agree
That the little burger could have been—
Could have been something or someone.
III
My fingers—fragile and crafty though
They think they are, they act accordingly—
According to my will and testament
Proclaim them by their action and actions.
The eye offendest and the eye dislodgest
Itself by doing so. Fingers discover themselves.
IV
Weird, it's weird how its weirdness
Is an ellipse, a familiar look to me,
A looking at me and a looking alikeness.
The tails end somewhere inside
Scarily attached somehow unknown
Clearly enough. Fingers, pluck it pluck it.
[end page 5; typed on clean sheet]
Loosely, bardic women entice their men to be alone.
Allowing for variables and other friction type factors,
I'd have to arrive around late afternoon tomorrow—
that is, if you're willing, accepting and warm.
In other ways you'd calm me by freeing wholely
the leftish half of your brain—make anew, show
true manliness in falling, particulate thineself, sow!
Calling to me, to make me—realize of course I'm
bound to be gagged about the waist with a bulge
you'd necessarily turn sick with sports.
Your atramentous—black—inklike—spirituality falters.
And illegitimately piercing your hovering transcendency,
incapability, I pick lint from your navel, ickily dark.
[end page 6; typed on blue paper, the backside of a cover sheet about Indiana University's graduate studies in English program]
Game of shit.
forced by family to catch his shit,
catch it quickly as he slings it,
the way a shortstop fields hot ones,
snaps his hands into stinging place
to stop those balls or lose his grown ones.
issuing calls from below his belt,
he makes those receivers jangle;
and with his words, entangles emotions,
necessitates notions of flight; flee!
they're not free; they cost too:
his shouts—his costlies—like his shits.
no cups, no jocks, no support, no cover,
trapped in a game the he knows
only shows him that you,
his hereditary lover,
are waried scarily of him.
fear death and sorrow because
tomorrow or today he could charge for breath
and probably will, too, just to show you
that he bought his; why shouldn't you?
if not, his world ends—ends without meaning.
history consoles, "love him, pay him—
or he'll tax your head for goldsies needed,"
because he hates us all but needs us too.
he hates you more, maybe only because
you are to him—but never were—his baby.
[end page 7; typed on pink paper; backside of Wayne State University Satisfactory Progress Policy for Continued Financial Aid Eligibility]
Pyg like me on the Sweetest Day of the Year in America
A bruise on my groin ain't quite a bruise,
it's like a buncha dots o' blood track marks almost:
Adonis's spear, like my own, shoulda broke
before he coulda went down pain inna crotch
like mine now is a ache inna muscles
anna leak inna heart drippin acid on Psyche.
Galatea woulda been huge if ida made'r;
she'da been taller'na statue in our bay
and more masculine too even'ough
she shoulda complemented me like aea
complemented Uranus—the stinky, puckered
old sky god king who couldn't hold a spear
to 'is own son 'n' when 'e did,
he let it foam inna sea and set 'er free
to wreak havoc on me.
His stinkin daughter ain't done me no good
nor her ancienter chubby son.
They bruise my groin and rip my chest.
They infinite wisdom love me to death
and stretch me out on poetry out of breath.
[end page 8; typed on lavender paper; backside of University of Iowa's Master of Arts with Emphasis in Expository Writing program description]
izhusistherissis Moon*
"Let us go then, you and I"
and way up high, it, too,
was lost. A really, really, long
place to go to in a fear-filled night;
soft and bright; overbearing night;
it lit a lot of sky and grassy plain.
Clearly, sifting through other lights
in other, kind an cloudless times
was not a task beyond her means;
nor was she afraid of screaming.
Cold on one side (that we all know)
side is not the way to glow.
Back we go to Hotel Hell
To live among the tuna smell.
And again slimy (and liking it less this time)
and climbing from a sea-bathed craft—
I had made a mess in my pants,
"Back to life from the vacuum of space!
Returned alive from death by suffocation."
Now, though, certain —they are, they are, I tell you—
people and streets and shops and shoes...
Back we go to Hotel Hell
To live among the tuna smell.
Evenin's mistress, you playful,
lovely lady: enticing, entrancing—
alone. Together we've been dancing
*this is a phonetic spelling in american english of how "It's just that there was this..." is said in excited, conversational speech.
[end page 9; typed on clean white paper]
in a self-confined, writhing embrace.
The threat and challenge of more discoveries;
coming home with a first-hand vision of Atlantis...
I have seen Marianas-like depths
where the tension and pressure felt
were not death. I have sneered
at the mirror and the wonderful image there—
the all-knowing fear of Moon;
my distrusts at wanting—. Only a moon
would ever, ever wear a dress.
God! forceful, graceful son!
Please, lord—Christ, my life can not be done.
A meager taste for slender hair—
A need for a wave of such desire—
Faltering faltering...falling hero on fire.
No: I will wring dry my gown—
a firm asbestos garb. And I will frown.
My last words will not be cute
or shiny or "awe" or "beauty" or "smile"—
My last words shout, My My My.
It may exist, but I — a whole — I mean.
Jesus Christ, you are fair.
I have gone in there.
[end page 10; typed on clean white paper]
For your 0nly son
I
In the Winter when the trees have been stripped
of all their leaves, it is all too clear
at night for the little starries to point out
how the backdrop—the falling cliffside behind
the trees—is also barren if not for the trees.
And though a Moon's bright eye shines visibility
onto the snowy bleak scene and passes by,
the dry dirt crumbles—unsatisfactory.
Without trees, without leaves, it is pure dead.
II
There is to be the weeping
Followed by the wake:
Lots of plots of eating cakes
And teas and it is all in vain.
Vanity drives them to this
As Insanity plunged into that
Which was too hard, too empty.
It was too empty hard to miss.
0nly living can discuss
All or any ways he meant to them.
III
Drop a friend in the water and
We—the muffled reflection,
The turds and the vomit,
The blood and the snot,
(Even beside the budding tree
Fed by this stream)
Imperfect replicas of life;
Glorified, ditch-digging failures—
[end page 11; typed on yellow paper; backside of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's list of graduate faculty in the Department of English and Comparative Lit]
Are all that were and are
IV
Nothing complain
Around reasonably fallen leaves
Mistaken Quicken Enliven
Love lives Nothing dies because of you
It lives scrape its own nails
Bleeding walls for
Here are six six of them numbers
Here now
Take it! Use it! Freeze frozen life
"'Sighs and Plants,' I say."
V
Occasional starry nights
are also cloudy ad warm
despite the winds' chills;
Finite pieces of life
are all too much alike
for a love of life to be made
Just like someone;
really, it doesn't matter—
VI
He, he really only knew you.
Unfortunately for you
as well as poorly for he
had forgotten himself
His only only, His only self.
Fear, 0 God; Fear o' God:
There There There 0 god
is there!
[end page 11; typed on white paper; backside of a list of graduate level courses (for Binghamton?)]
He was Super Freeze
among your winter-armèd trees
a loneliness
an emptiness
for such reason
goddamn, DAMN, goddamn season
VII
0 it was read
And made a deeper black than the skin
In his anus
As it, too, was fetid stain.
Read again still
By moving tongue.
Blame in us but never
But blamed by us
VIII
Again, never ending
As always in a new way.
IX
When we are here
And he is not,
We are here
And he
Is N0T
X
You survive him, 0 you loving souls
Though not here now in our words or thoughts,
Though existing independently
Of all such and other things, alone,—0! all
Alone with your excuses and reasons—
Sighing into yourselves, you speak and think of him.
[end page 12; typed on yellow paper; backside of p.3 about U. Wisconsin-Milwaukee's graduate program]
When the dirt and snow fall down upon his
Muddy corpse in a muddy copse of trees
0n a silently shrouded December
Day, he will not cry; he will feel no pain.
He will cease.
0nly we will remain and speak of him.
[end page 13; typed on yellow paper; backside of p.1 about UW-M's graduate program]
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