40 Years of Poetry with David Hassler

David Hassler (00:00):
We have spent 40 years transforming grief into gift. When you think about the very origin of the Wick Poetry Center, and so many of our projects are bringing poetry to help people process and make sense of what's troubling them in their lives. And I think we really hit our stride.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:18):
Welcome to Page Count, presented by the Ohio Center for the book at Cleveland Public Library. This podcast celebrates authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, literary advocates and readers in and from the state of Ohio. I'm your host, Laura Maylene Walter, the Ohio Center for the book Fellow and author of the novel BODY OF STARS. Today we're speaking with David Hassler, a poet and the director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. The Wick Poetry Center is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. David, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.

David Hassler (00:54):
Thank you Laura. Great to be here.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:57):
Well, since we'll be talking about poetry and the poetry center, all things poetry, I thought it was only appropriate if we include poetry in this podcast. So you have prepared a few poems to read throughout this episode. Would you please open up with a poem?

David Hassler (01:13):
Thank you. Absolutely. I'd like to start by reading a very new poem that I wrote in honor of the total eclipse, the total solar eclipse in 2024. This is a poem that you know, the Wick Poetry Center we've developed some digital tools and platforms and one of them is to invite people to share their voice, to answer a prompt based on a model poem, and then pin their creative reflection, their poem, their stanza on a map of the world, or in this case of the path of totality of the total eclipse. And then viewers can on the website, view the responses either on a gallery page or on a visual map and click icons to read the different submissions. I like to tell folks that my brother, two and a half years older, a little shorter, but two and a half years older, is a solar physicist and quite passionate about his work.

David Hassler (02:06):
And I'm the poet and our father, Mack Hassler, who taught for 48 years here at Kent State University in the English department. His main field of study was science fiction. So my brother and I are two halves of my father's brain <laugh>. I like to think of it as the light and the dark side of the moon. So this is a poem called SHARED SKY and I actually sent it to my brother for revision suggestions. He was hard on it, but appreciative. And it's part of a community poem website that we built working with a solar physicist from Stanford University, Amy Norton, and with a partnership with NASA called Shared Sky. So it's one of our poets for science projects and this is an opportunity for me to be creative and to actually for the first time in our community poem building to write the model poem.

David Hassler (02:55):
"Shared Sky"

David Hassler (02:56):
"Sun and Moon, bring us together, all of us, sky watchers, stargazers staring up, dreaming out beyond ourselves. Let us wonder at our clockwork universe and witness your magical vanishing act. We want to stand in the sweet spot, aligned on the path of totality, to watch as the Moon’s umbra flies from Mazatlan to Newfoundland, over Texas, Ohio, and Maine, gathering our homes, schools, farmlands, and rapt, upturned faces. We want to converge with you, disappear for a moment, crowned with a gleaming, evanescent corona. What diamond of insight can be revealed as the Moon nibbles at the Sun’s edge, while metallic, liquid light swims about, fraying the corners of our blankets? What can we see in the dark? We humans are here on Earth to gawk, to bear witness to the spectacular. Teach us, Sun and Moon, to live in alignment with each other. Remind us our hearts are small cousins of you, our home star, rhythmically pulsing, expanding and contracting. Guide us in your cosmic dance. Pull us together along a shared path to whoop and cheer at your beauty."

Laura Maylene Walter (04:36):
Oh, that was fabulous. Thank you so much. And a poem about the eclipse seems so perfect because that was a major event in Ohio this year and there's something about the eclipse and creativity that just go together. Here in Cleveland I had a piece of writing in Literary Cleveland's project where actors acted out pieces of writing about darkness.

David Hassler (04:56):
Yes. Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (04:57):
Yeah. It was really, really fascinating. It was so fun. And as a writer it was nice just to sit in the audience and watch someone else perform my words and I didn't have to get up there.

David Hassler (05:05):
What an honor, right? Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (05:06):
Right. I'm curious about your brother and the feedback that he had about that poem. What, just generally, what kind of feedback did he have for you?

David Hassler (05:13):
Well, I mean he was looking for accuracy.

David Hassler (05:18):
So I have figurative language, but we all know our, the best metaphors are factually accurate and yet work on a figurative level. So I think he was just questioning some of my word choices and made a few tweaks that I think improved the poem. He has a poets heart and he talked about actually why he went into physics because he witnessed a partial eclipse when we were kids in northeast Ohio. He wrote an essay about that memory and one of our tools we call Emerge, which is a digital form of erasure or blackout poetry. And we were actually able to use his essay among about nine others on the Shared Sky website where people could read a primary source text, read an essay, click and unclick words, and they become more bold as you click them and you make a found poem from an existing document. So in his own way, he was a participant in this creative activity of our Shared Sky project.

Laura Maylene Walter (06:14):
Well, let's get into talking about the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. For our listeners who maybe aren't familiar, can we just get down to the basics and can you tell us what is the Wick Poetry Center?

David Hassler (06:26):
Well, the Wick Poetry Center was founded in 1984, out of a deep loss. Two brothers, Bob and Walter Wick lost their sons seven years apart in car accidents on the same day June 30th. Bob's son was Stanley, Walter's son was Tom. And initially in 1984, they grew up in Niles, Ohio. They both went to Kent State University. Bob ended up as a sculptor teaching in the art department here. But after their son's death, they created a scholarship, the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Scholarship in 1984 for Kent State undergraduate students. And that remained, you know, a beautiful scholarship program for many years until our founding director, Maggie Anderson, was hired in 1989 as a graduate faculty poet, a wonderful poet. And she learned about this scholarship and began to grow an idea to turn it into something larger. She created a very robust reading series and then worked with the Kent State University Press to develop a Wick Poetry book series, the Ohio Chapbook Contest and the Stan and Tom Wick National First Book contest, both of which the winning manuscripts were published by Kent State University Press.

David Hassler (07:42):
And the Wick Brothers loved Maggie's vision for growing the program and they contributed more money and it began to grow and expand. And then Maggie hired me in 2000 to develop an outreach component to the Wick poetry. It was called the Wick Poetry Program at the time. And I had been working as a poet in the schools for the Ohio Arts Council. I met Maggie in 1989, right when she arrived at Kent. And actually she was my first poetry mentor. I did one year of graduate work at Kent State and she was my graduate poetry instructor in 1990. After I started working as a poet schools, we stayed in touch and she said, can you develop an outreach component to our Wick program? And I created a class called Teaching Poetry in the Schools where I trained Kent State undergraduate students to go out into our local Northeast Ohio community and lead workshops. And in 2004, the Wick brothers made a $2 million tenure year pledge to elevate the program to the Wick Poetry Center, part of the College of Arts and Sciences alongside the English department. And that granted me a full-time job as the Program and Outreach Director and Maggie became the center's first Director. It's kind of evolved and continued to grow from there.

Laura Maylene Walter (08:55):
Yeah. That history is so, it's tragic, but it's also heartening to see what has come out of it in the decades since. Yeah so you've been there involved since 2000, so you are definitely the best person to talk to about all the amazing things that you do there. And I know one of your big projects that has been really celebrated over the years is the Traveling Stanzas Project. Tell us about that. What is that and how does it work?

David Hassler (09:19):
In 2009, just before Maggie retired, I got a phone call from a professor in the visual communication design program, Velora Renicker. And she said, you know, I have these incredible graphic design students who are looking for poems to make into posters. They will be displayed on the RTA, the Cleveland RTA system. She said, could you give me some Wick author poems? But I thought at the moment, what if we elevated the voices in our own community from the outreach and we curated poems from children, veterans, seniors, you know, everyday folks who have gone through writing workshops with us and found a way to express themselves in a memorable way that could be communicated to the larger community. And so I curated 10 poems from our outreach from a wider range of people, and they were designed into these beautiful posters and we expanded the ways that we displayed them not only on RTA, but the Akron Metro Bus System and the Portage Parda, our own Portage County system.

David Hassler (10:14):
And then we put them in libraries and we made greeting cards out of them. And year after year we began to expand this idea of bringing poetry to everyday lives and creating these installations in our own communities so people could encounter poems in places where they would not expect to find a poem. We came up with this name Traveling Stanzas in part because we were traveling out into the community and bringing poetry to everyday folks. You know, we call ourselves "word nerds" at the Wick Poetry Center, and I love that the word stanza from Italian means literally a small room. You know, we use stanza in English to talk about sections of a poem like the little rooms of a poem. Where these traveling stanzas were installed out in our community...we wrapped them around metal utility boxes in a partnership with the City of Kent.

David Hassler (10:58):
And they paid for these beautiful wrapped boxes. I like to think that they offer a moment of pause or a little pocket of time when somebody stops on the sidewalk and reads a poem and they slow down and enter into the room of a poem. Maj Ragain, another mentor of mine and a beloved poet professor at Kent State who passed away several years ago, used to say that poetry is a means by which a place comes to know itself. And so I think these traveling stances have been a way to celebrate the voices in our own community and to know our community better through these poems.

Laura Maylene Walter (11:30):
Yeah, I think that's so important. I think sometimes in our culture there's an idea that poetry is not accessible to everybody or it's meant to be hard to understand.

David Hassler (11:38):
Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (11:39):
And I actually remember in that time I had a different job in downtown Cleveland and I took the RTA and I remember occasionally getting to see one of the poems, you know?

David Hassler (11:47):
Oh, wonderful.

Laura Maylene Walter (11:48):
Yeah. It was always a treat to be on the bus or the train and see a poem. So more poetry everywhere is what I say, just paper Northeast Ohio with poetry <laugh>. Well another big project you have is Poets for Science, and that's involved with the poet Jane Hirschfield. And there's a quote from her on the Wick Center website that I really loved, and I'll read just part of it.

Laura Maylene Walter (12:11):
"Poetry and science each seek to ground our lives in both what exists and the sense of the large of mystery and awe. Every scientist I know is grounded in curiosity, wonder, the spirit of exploration, the spirit of service as is every poet".

Laura Maylene Walter (12:28):
Which I just think is so fantastic. Can you tell us about this program and how it works?

David Hassler (12:33):
Love to talk about this project Poets for Science, which has become a kind of umbrella project like Traveling Stanzas. Many micro sites and collaborations with specific projects under that umbrella. And now that I think about it, again, it was a phone call serendipitously from Jane Hirschfield in 2017. She called me and said, David, I have this idea to bring poetry to the March for Science on the National Mall, the very first march for Science on Earth Day in 2017. She said, can you help me with doing this? And I said, well, of course. And she curated 23 poems about science. We worked with this incredible design firm called Each and Every in Kent, Ohio. And they designed 23, 7-foot pull up banners. And we went to the the National Mall and we had a teach-in tent. People were writing poems inside the tent, making blackout poems on cards that were preprinted with speeches from those speaking that day.

David Hassler (13:25):
And then we were taking pictures of those found poems and putting them onto an aggregated Twitter feed. We were giving out posters, excerpts of our poems about science. And they were marching in the March for Science with poems in their hands. I mean, it was just unbelievable. And it hit a nerve. I mean, it absolutely hit a nerve, not just in DC, But nationally. And people started asking, can we have your Poets for Science exhibit come to Vanderbilt University or come to the March for Science Education Summit a year later in Chicago? And it really began to take off. And then we started continuing to innovate digital tools and platforms and using them for our Poets for Science project. And we recently, two years ago, had the exhibit in a very beautiful iteration of it at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC for six months and, and actually presented it at the Nobel Prize Foundation summit there.

David Hassler (14:20):
Jane and I both spoke at that summit and you know, did a kind of Poets for Science presentation. Another quote of Jane's I love, which I have to say you'll find it on the website where she says, "Poetry and science are not opposites, but allies and the microscope and the metaphor are both instruments of discovery". So we have found the appetite for exploring new ways to feel and understand our scientific knowledge and to convey it. You know, I think science has gone through a crisis of communication with the public and poetry comes as an aid, as an ally to help communicate the power and the way science can contribute to the greater good. And a lot of our new work now is working with organizations around climate change and the climate crisis and youth. And we've built several community poems and microsite projects under our poster science umbrella focused on the climate crisis and voices of the youth.

Laura Maylene Walter (15:17):
So speaking of those community poems, I believe you said you had one you might like to share with us.

David Hassler (15:23):
I do. We had the wonderful opportunity a year ago to partner with AGU, the American Geophysical Union, and the editors of an anthology called DEAR HUMAN AT THE EDGE OF TIME: POEMS ON CLIMATE CRISIS IN THE UNITED STATES. And this was a beautiful anthology published in conjunction with the NCA5, the National Climate Assessment, you know, published by the US government. So we worked with those editors and we built a microsite where people could choose one of three poems from that anthology and share their own reflection following a prompt. Then Aileen Cassinetto, one of the editors along with Luisa A. Igloria and Jeremy Hoffman. Aileen and I then worked together to craft a community poem from the responses to this interactive microsite. And then the American Geophysical Union made a beautiful video. They created audio recordings of the contributors from around the world. And then they edited that with found footage and photographs into a video which lives on our poster science website called Dear Human at the Edge of Time.

David Hassler (16:26):
And I'll read that poem. This is a poem weaving anonymously the voices of about 18 different scientists and advocates from around the world who participated on the interactive website.

David Hassler (16:38):
"Dear Human at the Edge of Time."

David Hassler (16:42):
"Say, anyone here seen a jumpfrog lately? Not the saucy poster frogs making the circuit of nature museums, but the hearty bulls who advertised their longing, who puffed up and peed in your berry-stained hands. Who can deny that sea stars are stunning? The way their arms sparkle with jewels, the way they regenerate. I have only so many limbs and I can’t grow back what I’ve lost. When did we lose our way to a place where we value roads over rivers, parking lots over prairies, resorts over reefs? It doesn’t seem like you should be able to hold panic like a too-full cup. But all day it sloshes and slips inside of me. These days it’s all about walking lightly on this earth, listening to all who are speaking beyond words. If the songbirds can still sing, then we can still hope. If the roots of the old pines protruding from the asphalt slow your walk, then stop to thank them for this moment, to steady the feet, to look beyond the wire fences where wild wheat glows golden and soft in the sun, as if discovering what light can do for the first time. Have you heard the whispers that ride along the breeze and come out in the rustle of the leaves? That live in the dew drops as they sparkle on the morning grass, in the atoms that vibrate to make apple skins and shrimp shells? They travel through the sun’s rays and come out in refractions. Have you heard the whispers? Listen, they are everywhere. I’ve found a way to pray. Through my feet, I reach down. There’s something animate, mycelial, that touches me back. It’s a species of love, a thinking-spike, a zinging circuit of energy. And what if we could stop it, after all, could stop the change too swift for us to grasp, listening instead to the maple’s sweet dusk drip in the metal bucket? Can we learn to live in sync with nature and in harmony with one another? The stranger asked: what has kept you from singing? I had no answer save for this melody within me, rising and rising. Look inward at that core of ourselves. Remember our past, and decide who we wish to be. When we tell the story of how we survived the collapse, we might say: like birds, we learned to move as one. We grew lighter and lengthened our wings."

Laura Maylene Walter (19:25):
Just listening to you read poetry today, I'm finding it very restorative. I've had a really hectic last few weeks and this is a reminder for me. I need more poetry in my life, so.

David Hassler (19:35):
Amen sister <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (19:36):
Yeah, I appreciate it. Well, I do want to talk about the 40th anniversary and before we get to that, are there other programs you'd like to highlight at the Wick Center? And I'm also curious, you know, if you're located at Kent State University, how the Wick Center works with students, both undergraduates and graduates. Kent is one of the homes to the NEO MFA program. So what else would you like to tell us about your programs or initiatives?

David Hassler (19:58):
Well, I think the Wick Poetry Center thrives and ticks and its heart beats in part because of our continued collaboration on our campus and in our community with other disciplines. And the students are small army of poets that work as interns and fellows and work study students at our center. Every semester we have, gosh, around 10 students working as interns. They get experience helping teach workshops in the community. They work with writing. We've had a graduate fellow write the model poem for a collaboration with the Akron Zoo. All aspects both administrative and creative of our Center our students participate in. And I have incredible staff that I work alongside and they are both wonderful poets, published poets, excellent teachers, educators and administrators. Charlie Malone, our assistant director of outreach and programs recently just co-edited a, a beautiful anthology in collaboration with the Cuyahoga Valley National Park building off of an initial website that we built with the Cuyahoga Valley National Park called the Poetic Inventory.

David Hassler (21:05):
This book was published by the Kent State University Press, it's called LIGHT ENTERS THE GROVE: EXPLORING CUYAHOGA VALLEY NATIONAL PARK THROUGH POETRY. And he worked alongside Carrie George, who I would like to brag, was a undergraduate intern and then a graduate Wick Fellow, and now is the manager of Elizabeth's Bookshop in Akron, excellent poet herself. And then their third co-editor is Jason Harris, a wonderful poet from Cleveland. So this is a beautiful anthology of poems exploring the biodiversity and the beauty of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park with beautiful colored designs created by each and every originally posted on the gallery page of our website, printed alongside the poems. It's brand new, fresh off the press, really doing a wonderful job celebrating the incredible ecosystem of our literary world. Our writers in northeast Ohio from the Youngstown, Cleveland, Akron, Kent area. My other colleague, Dr. Jessica Jewell, our senior program director, has been taking the lead on a beautiful project with Ohio nurses called Sacred Breath: Nurses Give Voice to the Pandemic.

David Hassler (22:14):
It's a website we launched in the heart of the pandemic. She also, with her research skills, has published an incredible article assessing the impact of and the power of poetry for mental health and wellness and to help kind of be a counter to burnout among nurses. So between our students and our staff and our collaborators on our campus and our community, I think the goal of the Wick Poetry Center is to continue to innovate and find ways to bring poetry to the most urgent and evolving needs of our community. And we have this theme for our 40th anniversary called Celebrating 40 Years of Poetry &...it's a great big ampersand and. And as poetry and science, poetry and health and healing, poetry and peace and conflict, you know, we are here embedded in Kent State. We've done a lot with a global peace poem that we created for the 40th anniversary of honoring the shootings of Kent State in 2020. Poetry and the environment, you know, on and on, how can poetry help people have deeper and more meaningful conversations around different topics and themes and issues in their lives.

Laura Maylene Walter (23:22):
And listeners, I will be linking to all of these programs. I'll be linking to the anthology, which of course we encourage people to buy at a local independent bookstore.

David Hassler (23:31):
Elizabeth's Bookshop!

Laura Maylene Walter (23:33):
Elizabeth's in Akron, yes.

David Hassler (23:35):
Or Mac's Backs in Cleveland. A big shout out to Suzanne. A champion of writers.

Laura Maylene Walter (23:40):
Yes. We love Suzanne at Mac's Backs here. Absolutely. So I'll be sharing all these links and this is a good, uh, segue into the 40th anniversary. We're recording this a few weeks before the anniversary events and we will be posting it just shortly after your events conclude. But can you tell our listeners what you do have planned and also just what this 40th anniversary of the Wick Poetry Center means to you?

David Hassler (24:05):
Well, it means a heck of a lot. I like to say in numerology, the number 40 is considered the number for probation. 40 years in the desert, 40 days and nights. In world religions it's a very powerful number. And it talks about a kind of seismic shift that happens after 40 years and what gets resolved or what takes on a new life or a new framing. We have spent 40 years transforming grief into gift when you think about the very origin of the Wick Poetry Center. And so many of our projects are bringing poetry to help people process and make sense of what's troubling them in their lives. And I think we really hit our stride with our collaborative partners all around the country, actually around the world, and with our deeply embedded mission in our own local community. Local is global here in northeast Ohio.

David Hassler (24:53):
And kind of as a testament to that, I would say to listeners a warning to be careful what you wish for. Be careful what you dream up. And what we've dreamed up is three days of poetry, readings, panels, workshops, celebratory gatherings. We now have over 325 people registered to come. We have 47 past First Book and chapbook authors coming back to Kent, Ohio for these three days. We'll be hearing their voices in three different Wick author readings over three days. Our founding director, Maggie Anderson, we will feature her reading on our kickoff night, Thursday night. She'll begin with a long reading of her own work. And then we have Wick authors giving short readings after her on that first night. We're also bringing back four, well-known national poets, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Jane Hirschfield, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Adrian Matejka. Adrian, Jane, and Naomi were all Stan and Tom Wick First Book judges.

David Hassler (25:49):
A beautiful system that Maggie dreamed up in the early nineties where our national First Book contest would be judged each year by a well-known national poet. And that poet would come to campus along with the winning author to celebrate the release of that book. So September 19th, 2021, this will be aired after the fact, but we are filming everything at the anniversary. I think we'll create a place online where people can watch and listen to the readings. A lot is planned, a lot to celebrate. You know, I think of it as a pause in our evolution and a reaffirmation of the work ahead, you know, the muscle of poetry to bring poetry to everyday lives and bring it as a powerful tool to help people create meaning and a sense of longing with each other.

Laura Maylene Walter (26:36):
This event sounds huge. It is huge and I'm glad it will be filmed. And if we time travel when this airs, it will have already happened. So I'm sure it all went off without a hitch. And congratulations <laugh>.

David Hassler (26:47):
Thank you.

Laura Maylene Walter (26:48):
We have an embarrassment of riches in northeast Ohio for the literary world. Around that time the Inkubator's happening. And then we have Cleveland Book Week, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards are coming up. So you know, listeners in Ohio, you're lucky. We have a lot going on here. A lot of great stuff.

David Hassler (27:03):
A shout out now to not only this time period in Ohio, but the organizations. Lit Youngstown, Literary Cleveland, University of Akron Poetry series, the NEOMFA program, the Wick Poetry Center. This is something to celebrate and it's not expected. What I mean is we should not take it for granted. I think it's a great testament to our community and the innovation. And the support we get from the Ohio Arts Council, from the National Endowment for the Arts. There's a large healthy ecosystem around the literary world in our state.

Laura Maylene Walter (27:35):
Absolutely. I find that usually the problem is, is that there's too much to attend at the same time, which is amazing to have that problem, that there's such an interest and a need for it. And so many creative, hardworking, smart people are working to put this on. So we're all very lucky. And I'm curious, you know, you've had this career at the Wick Poetry Center. How has working there influenced your own poetry?

David Hassler (27:58):
You know, that's a great question. I like to think that like water, you know, like a river, finding new ways to flow when there's obstruction. The demands of running the Wick Poetry Center as the Director and now the Bob and Walt Wick Executive Director, thanks to a beautiful generous pledge from Chris Wick, Walter's son, that I've not written as many new poems as I would like to have written, but I have channeled a lot of my creative energy and passion into the community, into being creative with the community. Scripting community poems, building projects and collaboration with organizations and others. And that's been very gratifying. I've explored the boundary between the personal and the collective, and I've been happy to be of use to a larger collective and to the needs of our local community and to issues nationally. So that's been really gratifying to explore ways...I scripted a play based on the oral histories of the shootings at Kent State called May 4th Voices. I've worked on a nonfiction book of oral histories based on migrant workers in Hartville, Ohio with a wonderful photographer, Gary Harwood. So I've explored other genres that are maybe more easy to pursue while you have very demanding day jobs that don't allow you to have long stretches of time, of reverie, where poems often are incubated. So I have continued to write poems, but I think I've also really explored exciting editing projects and other forms of writing. I have no, no regrets. It's been exciting.

Laura Maylene Walter (29:31):
Yeah. Well and I think teaching and bringing poetry to people is another form of creation in a way and an influence. And I know you've taught poetry for people of all ages, so I'm curious what advice you might give to someone who's listening right now, someone who perhaps doesn't currently have poetry in their life at the moment. Where would you suggest they maybe start to add some poetry?

David Hassler (29:55):
The beautiful thing I feel is there's an incredible renaissance of poetry and the appreciation for poetry in our culture. Poem are everywhere, on Instagram, on the web. We turn to writing poetry because we love what we read. So I encourage people to just find a poem, whether it's Mary Oliver, who I brag as an Ohio poet, you know, of course she grew up in the Cleveland area. You know, we turn to writing because we want to emulate, we want to be in that conversation with what we've read. You know, William Stafford, a wonderful American poet, he talked about our bias in our contemporary culture is to talk about, to be strong is a kind of active muscle, you know, pushing outward. He said, what about the muscle of receptivity? What about strengthening that muscle of being open and receiving inspiration, which from Latin "inspira" means to breathe in.

David Hassler (30:41):
You know, inspiration comes from outside of us and we're open to it and we breathe it in. So I would encourage folks to just find poems that speak to them. Go to travelingstanzas.com, go to poetryscience.org, go to Literary Cleveland, Lit Youngstown. And once you are passionate about what you are reading, then it's an easy step to say, well I'm now I'm going to start writing. And you know, reading and writing are not separate acts. You know, I talk of active reading and writing that is drawing down for everything that has inspired you and it's coming out through your pen or through your keyboard. That back and forth is happening all the time. And I think strengthening our muscle receptivity to allow that to happen is all it takes. And giving yourself time that little pocket of time, whether you get up early and it's 20 minutes or an hour, it's that little pocket of time, that moment of pause, that little stanza in your day, step into that room or be open to the voices around you.

Laura Maylene Walter (31:41):
Maybe we could conclude this episode by giving our listeners some poetry. So if you have one or two more poems that you would like to read to take us out.

David Hassler (31:52):
Thank you Laura. I thought maybe I would read a poem about my father. As I mentioned, my brother, and I mentioned how my father taught for 48 years in the English department at Kent State. And I was determined not to go into academia.

Laura Maylene Walter (32:07):
<Laugh>, oops.

David Hassler (32:07):
But I graduated from college and was dissatisfied with most career paths and began a slow apprenticeship of wanting to be a writer. Often that meant doing odd jobs and living very frugally. It also meant landing back at my dad's house, often penniless, you know, in transitions between one city and another, one job and another. This is in my early twenties and this is a poem that recalls an encounter I had with my father in the Kent State Library, giant building, a tall building, and kind of a self-realization, seeing him and myself literally bumping into each other as we walked through the stacks, looking at books.

David Hassler (32:48):
It's called "My Father in the Stacks."

David Hassler (32:51):
"For hours in his study, he'd disappear into the private chambers of a story. Walls within walls. His bookshelves dwarfed me. His large oak desk held the family photo. Tall straight stacks in the yellow plots of legal pads. Sometimes he'd passed me a book if my hands were clean. I've grown tall like my father, wandering dark hours of the afternoon in fields of print rustling pages. Back home at the university where my father teaches, I walk through the library on the seventh floor, no call number in mind. I turn the aisle and he is there in the silence of so many books. We do not know what to say. I forgive our unwritten lives, the years we haven't read. We pass each other. My hands are clean."

Laura Maylene Walter (33:52):
Thank you so much. And it feels appropriate to end with a poem about memory and set in a library. Thank you David, so much for joining us. Everyone check out the links and put some poetry into your lives. Thank you so much.

David Hassler (34:07):
Thank you.

Laura Maylene Walter (34:10):
Page Count is presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review for Page Count wherever you get your podcast. Learn more online or find a transcript of this episode at ohiocenterforthebook.org. Follow us on Instagram @ohiocenterforthebook or find us on Facebook. If you'd like to get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org and put "podcast" in the subject line. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back in two weeks for another chapter of Page Count.