This may be as close as you’ll ever get in real life to the “Dead Poets Society.”
For those who remember, the Robin Williams film centered around a group of prep-school boys who took to studying — on their own — poems written years before they were even born and using them as inspiration for non-conformist behavior.
This isn’t exactly that, but the circumstances come close. In this case, former Salem State University professor Rod Kessler unearthed a treasure trove of poetry by Malcolm Miller, a virtual recluse, who died unattended in his public housing apartment in September of 2014. Kessler had met Miller several years earlier, quite by chance, and ended up, unbeknownst to him, as the man’s emergency contact. And, as it turns out, his posthumous publishing agent.
“I was still at Salem State, in the creative writing area, and periodically I’d get in my mailbox some cheaply-put-together poetry books. They were Malcolm’s, and he’d ask that if I liked the poems, to please send him $5.
“The address on the letter said ‘Pioneer Terrace,” and knew that was public housing,” Kessler said. “These were self-published poems, and I was always contemptuous of that. I always figured that if you were going to be a real writer, you had to be published by a real editor who deemed what you wrote to be worthy,”
Kessler sent the $5 to Miller, and as a result he kept getting more letters, asking for more money. Soon enough, he actually read one of the books of poetry.
“I was shocked,” Kessler said.”They were great. I felt bad, because I hadn’t given him consideration. I tried to get him to Salem State to read and discuss his poems in class; I tried to meet him for coffee, but no.”
He showed the poems to the editors of the literary magazine, “and they liked the poems, and made him their featured poet in one of the magazines.”
The two finally met in 2013, “and he was an old, frail guy, but with a burning intensity to him,” Kessler said. “He had no bed. Just a sleeping bag on the floor. He didn’t have a dresser. His clothes were in plastic bags that he hung off door knobs.
“But he kind of took a shine to me,” Kessler said. “He went into his kitchen, and there, he had an envelope stuffed with $100 bills. It was almost as if he lived the way he did out of some conspiratorial connection to feel alive.”
Kessler likened Miller to Henry David Thoreau living in a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord.
Miller died the following year, and was found only after a well-being check was done on his property 24 hours later.
“Unbeknownst to me, he listed me as his emergency contact, and I had to clear his stuff out of his apartment so it could be rented again,” Kessler said. “I was able to rescue all these books of poetry from the trash barrels and dumpsters they had been thrown in.”
Kessler would make Miller’s poetry his retirement project, sorting through the poet’s 3,500-plus poems (Miller had published two books conventionally before going his own way and self-publishing 59 more).
In the course of the next two years, after selecting the strongest 800 or so poems, Kessler turned to the community of writers on the North Shore for the opinion of second- and third readers. The resulting selection of poems led to the posthumous publication of individual poems in such literary magazines as The Paterson Literary review, the Journal of the Ohio State University, Canada’s Vallum. Miller’s poem “I remember,” about the Salem harbor of his youth, won the annual poetry prize of the International Lawrence Durrell Society.
Now, Grayson Books has issued a full-length selection of Miller’s poetry, “What I Am Always Waiting For.” Kessler wrote the book’s introduction.
In a way, it’s fitting that this book is published, but Kessler would have preferred it happen while Miller was alive to see it.
Copies of “What I Am Always Waiting For” are available from Beverly’s independent bookseller, Copper Dog Books, on Cabot Street (https://www.copperdogbooks.com/search/site/malcolm%20miller ), as well as from Amazon.
Miller grew up on Summit Street in Salem across from the then-Bertram School, which he attended. He was a graduate of St. John’s Prep and of McGill University in Montreal, a city he loved.
Miller’s life included periods of low-budget wandering in Italy, stints of homelessness, and one short confinement in Danvers State Hospital. In the 1970s, his poems were a feature in Salem’s alternate weekly, the Gazette (not related to the current paper of that name). A veteran of the U.S. Navy, Miller was laid to rest in Salem’s Greenlawn Cemetery by an honor guard on Nov. 19, 2014.