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A master of the margins, celebrated Santa Cruz poet, translator and journalist Stephen Kessler opens up about poetry, solitude, aging, and the hard won clarity that comes from a lifetime spent just outside the mainstream.
04/03/2026
A master of the margins, celebrated Santa Cruz poet, translator and journalist Stephen Kessler opens up about poetry, solitude, aging, and the hard won clarity that comes from a lifetime spent just outside the mainstream.
In this episode Bill and Deb interview renowned poet, translator, and columnist Stephen Kessler. Over the course of more than five decades, Stephen has moved from the upheavals of late‑1960s Santa Cruz into a life devoted to language in many forms—poetry, translation, criticism, and personal essay. Named Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year in 2023, he has become one of the Central Coast’s most distinctive literary voices, known both for his international work translating writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Luis Cernuda, and for his sharply observed local columns in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Stephen talks about how he didn’t so much choose poetry as feel chosen by it. As he puts it, he eventually discovered “it was poetry that wanted me and I was just its servant,” guided by what he calls the Muses—“creative dictators” directing his work. That sensibility runs through everything he does: his belief that writers “mine their own experience,” and his conviction that a poet’s job is to live at some distance from power, “questioning conventional wisdom” rather than becoming its official voice. We also explore how Stephen has consciously opted out of the always‑on digital world. He doesn’t carry a cell phone and prefers letters on paper, manual typewriters, and handwritten drafts. Having lived through a serious psychotic break in his early twenties, he has learned to protect his own nervous system from the constant stimulation of “the world’s nervous system” online, choosing instead a simpler, slower, more attentive way of living and working. Finally, Stephen reflects on aging and creative continuity. Now in his late seventies, he’s narrowed his practice to what matters most: his weekly Sentinel column, poems that arrive only when they “ask to be written,” and a rich network of friendships sustained in part through extensive postal correspondence. He speaks candidly about solitude versus isolation, the loss of friends over time, and why he has never been interested in conformity—insisting that an artist’s real value lies at the margins, where, as he says, you can “evoke what people don’t get through official channels.”
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