Meet Stephen Kessler
poet, essayist, novelist, translator, and editor.
Photo by Chip Scheur
I don't think Stephen would mind my saying that he's one of a dying breed, namely a man of letters committed fully to the practice of writing, reading, and translating literature. Though we've never met in person, he introduced himself to me by acknowledging a letter I wrote to The Redwood Coast Review. At the time, he was the RCR editor. Though a literary journal, it was pulbished in a newspaper format and available at no cost at the Santa Cruz library, and in other small coastal central California communities.
My first copy came to me in New England through the mail as part of my annual subscription. Imagine that. And along with my copy came a letter from Stephen, written with care and erudtion, asking if he could publish my letter. I'd written to him as the editor commenting on my day sin Santa Cruz, and on my use of a typewriter in Moldova in 1993 and how that simple machine, a Smith Corona Silent bought for five dollars at a church sale, complete with leather case, had been worth its weight in gold at the university there where I'd been teaching.
I think I may have piqued Stephen's abiding interest in Eastern Europe, Russia, the end of the Soviet era, and I was more than happy to say yes to his offer to print my little letter, editing out, of course, what wasn't relevant to the discussion he wanted to moderate in the journal, something he was quite skillful at, using the journal as a public forum, of sorts.
I wrote back to him and asked if I could take a crack at writing an essay about my time working for KOMY Radio in Watsonville, not far at all from Santa Cruz. I'd never published an essay before, though I'd worked as a newspaper reporter and had seen lots of my prose get pruned, clarified and butchered by editors paid to do that sort of thing.
Stephen said yes, by all means, I should give it a try. So, I did. Of course, the essay needed a lot of work, but Stephen was gracious in his criticism, and clear, and so I wrote a number of drafts, mailing them out to him across the country, waiting for his reply, until I'd fashioned an essay, Radio Days: Me And My Dad In The Theatre Of The Mind, he could then further improve and publish. I've included it in my collection, The Golden Staircase. I've also included a second essay which Stephen published, Without Papers. This one was about my mother, and a response to what Stephen had been writing about in RCR, taking on the touchy subject of immigration and assimilation. A subject that over 20 years later is still as touchy as it was then, if not more so.
I kept renewing my subscription to RCR, and I kept buying and reading Stephen's books. I should note that though we never met, I did attend one reading in Santa Cruz in which he, along with the poet William Everson, and Maude Meehan were the featured poets. I did meet Maude Meehan that night and got along with her extremely well.
What a remarkable woman she was. At the time, I was young enough to be her son, but that didn't matter. She treated me with the utmost courtesy and respect and interest. I need to create a post about Maude. She's a poet who, having died in 2007 at the age of 86, though she achieved some recognition, didn't receive the kind of attention and respect outside of California, in my opinion, that her work deserves.
I suppose the same could be said for William Everson, aka Brother Antoninus, who when I saw him read was nearing the end of his life, battling Parkinson's while he read and struggling to control his body as he shared a short story based on his childhood. The man wore a long white beard and long shocks of thinning chaotic white hair. He stood tall, but age and his infirmity kept him hunched over, gripping the podium to keep himself from trembling, and he kept on reading, defiantly so, fully invested, and there was a dimension to this experience that marked it as a reading that I've never forgotten.
I could say, and I do so respectfully, that the man knew he was going to die soon, and that he knew this was probably one of his last opportunities to read in public. All of this was on display, though unspoken, because he was there to share, not to promote himself, not to boast or sell a book. But to tell a story, with dignity and fire and passion. I remember thinking to myself that I was watching one of the unheralded greats.
Later, Maude Meehan and I talked about Mr. Everson's reading, and she told me it was sad that for someone like myself I hadn't been around to experience the man reading his poems in public when he was younger and known as Brother Antoninus and wore long monastic robes in town and to his readings, a man in his prime, flinty-eyed, self-possessed, deidicated to poetry and our shared spiritual life. "One of a kind" is how I remember Maude describing him. It's only decades later that I realize how correct her simple assessment had been.
Mr. Everson may still be read in some quarters, as he should be, but I think he stands apart and shouldn't be lumped in with the West Coast Beats such as Gregory Corso and Michael McClure. In my opinion he's not really a beat poet, and pre-dates them to a degree, in much the same way that Kenneth Rexroth did. But why quibble over such trivialities.
And here is another link, this one to Stephen memorializing the poet, Wanda Coleman, known by some as the Great Poet Of Los Angeles. This appeared originally in Poetry Flash, and can also be found on Stephen's web page: https://poetryflash.org/features/?p=KESSLER-Hahaha_Wanda_Colemans_Last_Laugh
I share these because I want to celebrate these poets, and to celebrate Stephen's respect and adroit use of language when writing about them. I believe he views them more as just his fellow poets, but as his friends. He also believes, as I do, these poets need not be forgotten. It's up to us, the living, to keep their work alive. The Internet is not going to do this work for us. We the living must spread the word, as always.
I wrote to Wanda Coleman from New England, having been given her address in a letter to me from Stephen. Wanda wrote back to me and was ever so gracious and supportive. I was just a young tyro who didn't know much and was seeking advice from poets whose work I admired.
At the time, I was working on a long poem about Los Angeles that would become eventually a chapbook of LA poems titled, A Dozen Lemons In Autotroplis. A lot of what inspired me to keep writing the poems in that chap came from Wanda's encouraging me to speak what I believed in, and had experienced, and to trust my senses. I cannot say that every poet I've ever written to has been as generous and supportive, taking the time to respond to a complete stranger.
Here is Wanda's brief capsule review for Stephen's book of poetry, After Modigliani.
"Widely acclaimed as a translator, essayist, critic, editor, and journalist, Stephen Kessler is first of all a poet, whose work has appeared in small press publications across the U.S. since the late 1960s. AFTER MODIGLIANI is his fifteenth book and his first collection of poems to be published in twenty years. Its sixty poems generously display the author's lyric intensity, ironic wit, clarity of vision, and range of imagination. Urban and natural landscapes, social and political realities, sexual love, memory, mortality, and consciousness itself are explored here with a sharp eye, a musical ear, and a crisply contemporary voice. These soul-deep, introspective songs by Stephen Kessler wax strongly of the philosophical, the nostalgic, and an acceptance of life's complexities tingled with a quiet rag -- this book is an 'alchemical' work of passion."
Stephen's poems, like Wanda's, like Everson's, share a renegade spirit. These are not written as poems to enhance teaching careers, or establish a brand, or to prove the poet attended the proper academies.
I like to think of it as the California spirit, embodied in Muir, in Robinson Jeffers, Rexroth, and in a novel such as If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes. This latter novel paints an incredible picutre of what the conditions were like for young black men employed in the munitions plants of southern California prior and during the second world war. This is an early work by Himes, long before he found success writing his more commercial Cotton novels, and it captures with a rough brilliance the tension and stress, all of it economic and racially motivated, that a young black man endures inside the plant from his white co-workers. I'd like to think we don't live in that world any longer. I know that in the factories I've worked in, I shared various lines with people of all races and religions. Tension exists everywhere in everything, to be sure, but thank God, we are all still trying to move on from baiting and outright hatred. The novel has an unmistakenly lived feel to it, and as a study in working class conditions, overt racism, and a specific era -- not as a tract or a lecture or a thesis, but as a story -- it's an undervalued masterpiece.
The cover below more or less says it all. It's the 40s and one of the uneducated white female factory workers says the black man did it to her, whether he's innocent or not (he's innocent), and all the white men gang up on him. Are we still living this way? I don't think so. Let's hope not. But we did live this way, no doubt, and one way to address racism in real terms to examine the works of those who lived it and survived it and have told about it.
Not every maverick, and not everything raw and edgy comes out of or is shaped by Manhattan. Not hardly. There is nothing worse in literary matters, especially, than East Coast snobbery. I think Stephen would agree with this.
Here is a link to his website, where you'll find an archive of the Redwood Coast Review, and Stephen's books, and a few complete versions of his published essays. https://www.stephenkessler.com/
The Architecture Of Memory: How Los Angeles Made Me A Poet, originally in the Los Angeles Review Of Books https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-architecture-of-memory-how-los-angeles-made-me-a-poet/#!
The Discreet Charm Of Luis Bunuel https://www.stephenkessler.com/essays/bunuel.html
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