Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to another installment of Unraveling Religion. I'm your host, Joel Lessees. I'm here with a dear friend and colleague and I don't know, David, what else? What else?
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Fellow worker in the Buddha field, as Mage would say. Yeah, turning the soil, the fertile soil for poetry.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm here with David Hassler. David, could you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, about wic?
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Yeah, well, thank you. I mean, I was. I feel blessed on so many levels. And it's been a journey to discovering poetry as a way to give voice to. As Naomi Shi Ab Nye says, what troubles us, you know, to. To. To continue to find a way to.
To integrate, you know, what we need to make sense of. And through the sharing of poetry and being part of a Sangha community, create a sense of belonging, you know, a sense of connection with others.
And, you know, I grew up in Kent, Ohio, as a child amongst a whole world of poets and poetry and art, dance and music. You know, it's a very vital town. I kind of, I think, absorbed a lot of that sense of freedom to explore through the arts, one's own, not just one's own identity, but how we make sense and meaning in the world and how we create a sense of purpose in our lives.
And when I returned back to. When I came back to Kent around the age of 25, I took a class, a graduate, my first ever creative writing class. And they had just hired. Kent State University had just hired Maggie Anderson. And the Wick Poetry center at that time in 1989 was simply the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Scholarships, a fund to. To give scholarships to students in memory of two cousins, Stanley and Tom. Their. Their fathers, Bob. Bob and Walt Wick, in 1984, established the. The. The Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Scholarships after Stanley, Bob's son, died in 1983, seven years after Tom passed away on the same day, June 30, in car accidents. So Maggie Anderson was hired to be the new faculty poet. And she began to dream up how these scholarships could grow into a vital program. And she started a reading series, the Wick Poetry Center Reading Series, and brought wonderful poets to the campus. And she worked with the Kent State University Press to create a national Stan and Tom Wick First Book Prize that involved a publication by the Kent State Press and an Ohio Chapbook prize for graduate or undergraduate students in Ohio.
And I took her class in 1990, in the spring of 1990, and discovered then what it meant to Keen. She had a poem called the Keener I didn't even know what the word meant. And, you know, and it's a beautiful word that a person in ancient times hired to wail and to, you know, and to publicly give ritual to the mourning process. Maggie. I quickly learned that Maggie had written beautiful poems about her mother, who died when she was nine. I heard her read those poems, and I, you know, I la. You know, I sort of. Kind of like bending down to, you know, like a divining rod bending down to some underground current of grief. I felt something in her that began to resonate and offer nourishment for me. My mother passed away when I was 12. She got sick when I was 11. And I didn't have a voice to talk about her. And in fact, we were encouraged not to mention her name, you know, and that. That sense of grief, that incomplete mourning on my behalf, you know, as a child, it just pushed. Got pushed down and repressed. And I kind of woke up at the age of 25. Well, you know, I started having inklings right around 21. But, I mean, I started to have this deep need to give voice to her and to reclaim that relationship with her. And poetry was modeled for me beautifully with Maggie. And then I met Mage Reagan and. And so many other Kent poets and, you know, was nurtured and brought into that to the wing of. Of this. Of this incredible community here in Kent. Yeah, that was. That was early on. I went away again and then came back again.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Tell us where you went when you. Your. Your departure.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: You know, I came back to Kent because as an undergrad, I went off to college, got an undergraduate degree in history, but a lot of it was comparative literature.
Graduated and felt none of this makes sense, these career paths. And I wanted to be a writer. And I started writing, having no formal training.
And when I came to Kent, I had applied in fiction to several MFA programs in fiction and did not get funding. I got into one of them, but did not get any funding. So my father, who taught for 48 years in the English department here at Kent State, said, you know, submit an application as a backup for a traditional master's, you know, graduate degree program in literature in English. So I got accepted. You know, I came back with kind of with my tail between my legs, having tried to launch myself out into the world in MFA programs and lived here for a year on my friend's farm just outside of Kent and did a year of graduate work and dropped out. So, I mean, I don't publicize that. The current director of the WIC Poultry center is in fact a Kent State dropout. I think my stubborn determination to find out how to write and how to become, you know, how to follow the path of a writer.
My, my year of graduate work was offered me tremendous opportunity to be around poets and to take Maggie's class and to absorb the poetry scene in Kent. And I knew that I wanted to continue with that work. And so I, I bought a one way ticket initially to Taiwan, Taipei, Taiwan. I wanted to write, I wanted to focus on writing. And I knew that if I completed my master's and did an academic thesis for my master's in that second year and also taught, you know, as part of my stipend, taught a freshman composition class, I would be at odds with my own time and space that I needed and perhaps distance and certainly distance too from that which I needed to write about, which was my, my childhood here in Ken, Ohio. So being a graduate student in a, you know, in an academic program in one's own hometown is not very conducive to breaking through, you know, the barriers to find a voice to write about that, that trauma, that, that loss. And so however, traveling across the world to the other half of the world whose language I couldn't speak and having that out of body, you know, experience proved to be phenomenally fertile and a phenomenally powerful way to focus in on, to have that space and time to focus in on myself. And I, I did not stay in Taiwan for long. I, I then bought a one way ticket to Tokyo and you know, had my Lonely Planet travel guide in my back pocket and no, no, no connections, no prearranged place to stay or job.
And from the Narita airport I called seven or eight. I finally, you know, the seventh or eighth boarding house, they call them gaijin house, which in literally means barbarian in Japanese, but it's a word they use for foreigner boarding house. They said, well, we don't, we don't have any rooms. It was July. It was July. A heat wave, 1990, but you can sleep on the roof. And so I went to coma house, dragged a mattress onto the roof of a four story boarding house in Komagome prefecture from downtown Tokyo and slept three or four nights on the roof until a room opened up and I moved down and while at the same time opened the Monday Japan Times newspaper which was printed in English and had that week's job offerings for teaching English as a second language and went to an interview at Bilingual Language Institute and had a job within a week teaching conversational English. So you know, the ability to pay for my, you know, to afford to live there. And I lived for a year in Tokyo, meeting travelers from all over the world, often meeting travelers who in fact had begun a journey, an open ended journey, because they were troubled or they had some thing they needed to grieve or to mourn, they had lost something. And travel was a way of mourning for them and a way of starting something new, leaving, leaving one's old life behind, a kind of death, you know, travel in that way. And some wonderful friends that I've stayed in, some of whom I've stayed in touch with and, and kept what I called my Tokyo journal. It was a journal just to write down my thoughts as I moved through the day, words I learned, stories I heard, and sitting in coffee shops, you know, in Tokyo, a kind of luscious solitariness. You know. In fact, I wrote a.
I started only after I returned from Japan writing formal poems, trying to make poems of those memories of Japan which linked to memories of my childhood. And I ended up putting together a collection called Sabishi Poems from Japan. And sabishi in Japanese means lonely, but it's not necessarily a derogatory term.
Sense of loneliness. It's often a kind of fertile solitude.
So Sabishi Poems from Japan.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: You know, one of the questions that arose actually, David, was how, in your, your time in Tokyo, how did that slowly enter into bridging what you were kind of there for? I mean, how. What was that experience of slowly bridging into what you were there for?
[00:11:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question.
You know, profoundly, I, I threw myself into living in Tokyo, being open to whatever I could see or feel and experience. And in truth, you know, I absorbed that experience very deeply and then carried it with me back to Ohio where it began to percolate and more and, and merge with memories of my own childhood. So, so, so the poems came out of, out of a slow process of being, you know, marinated in this, in this experience in Tokyo, in this culture, and then taking with me, taking back with me cultural stories and, and scenes, you know, contemporary present day scenes in Tokyo and experiences and merging that with my own childhood memories and, and, and my experience here in Ohio. But I had this profound dream and I've. I've just finished actually working and I feel it's relatively finished.
A memoir called the Prayer Wheel, with poems and prose interspersed. And, you know, I, I talk about voices that have come to me in dreams or been spoken to me by, by perfect strangers as though they are messengers and I had this profound dream near the end of my year living in Tokyo. And I was. Had not decided yet if I was going to renew my contract to stay another year, teach at the school for a second year or move on, you know, continue wherever this, my journey was taking me. It was a dream in which I woke up from it completely drenched in sweat, you know, kind of jolted up from my bed.
But in this dream I saw, I first saw, it was like I was visiting. It was a room that reminded me of the, of the intensive care unit, you know, the hospital room where my mother essentially was for two months.
And it was a scene, you know, mysterious and kind of dream logic. A woman in a bed couldn't quite see her face and, and a man that was tending to her, who first looked young and then as he walked up to me closely became an aged, very old, wrinkled faced man.
And I leaned down to the woman in the bed and all I could hear was a tone of voice, but no, I couldn't make sense of any words of what she was saying. And then in my dream was a voice like a voice over. I mean it was not spoken by the man or the woman. And it said, you haven't begun to do what you have to do.
And that's when I jolted up awake out of, out of the dream. And it was, it was crystal clear. It was a, it was a voice, you know, guiding me to say, you know, you've. You haven't begun to do what you have to do. And so, you know, two or three days after that dream, again, I hadn't decided to leave. I hadn't decided to not renew my contract. As if I'm a little slow, dullheaded and slow to pick up on the cues. I got hit by a taxi as crossing the street with library books and ended up laid on my back in my apartment for a month, for four weeks, not unable to walk. No, no, no broken bones, but massive in one leg, internal bleeding, very painful. And it was at the end, it was while convalescing and not teaching at my school and remembering that dream that I decided it's time for me to leave. And so I left Japan.
I ended up going to Paris where my brother had a National Science foundation grant for. For was living for two years and stayed for a little bit with him and his apartment in Paris and then found a little chamber de bun, little maids attic room and rented it from a family with four sons who I tutored for the cost of the rent and ended up living there hand to mouth for several months and then came back in earnest to. Back to Ohio and spent a year writing and reapplying to graduate MFA programs and wrote began poems about living in Japan, which I then completed my first year of an MFA program.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: There's a lot to unpack here, from the memoirs to the influences of Mae Dragan and your experiences as executive director of Wick Poetry center at this time and place. Are you. Is there a sense about your affinities, your karmic affinities of why Japan? Why Tokyo? When you look back upon, in. In hindsight, upon this sort of the long view of your retrospective of life, like why Tokyo? Why. Why Japan? Like, what was that?
[00:16:33] Speaker B: Yeah, well, for my work study job in college, I was a projectionist for Cornell Cinema. And so I was up there in a little booth playing, you know, threading film during the week, showing, you know, art films and. And retrospective. So I watched the Ozu films and I watched a beautiful early film of Vinvenders called Tokyo Ga. And you know, ga, God just is a marker that shows the word before it is a subject.
And it was, you know, one of his early quasi documentaries, you know, about a brooding German narrator walking through the streets of Tokyo, in and out of pachinko parlors and past bright neon signs, you know, in this. In the 70s, the film was made late 70s, I think.
And it kind of planted a seed in me, you know, where could I go to brood, you know, where. Or where. Where could I go to to be a flanner, you know, the term, you know, a wanderer in a city. And, you know, I was very attracted to many of the icon, aesthetic, principles and concepts of Zen and of haiku, you know, and this is kind of what I was.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: That was my question mark, was. Yeah, you know, with. With Kent is a kind of, you know, I've always seen Kent. I think in my. My maturings, I could see Kent as an epicenter, a spiritual vortex of a confluence of a lot of things vital, a portal to infuse into the world necessary things. And tucked away in Kent, Ohio, right, there was a zendo. How long was that zendo there? The zendo was there for a while. You go to the second floor of the Brady's Cafe. I talk about it in volume two of Journeys of Sacred Community, where, you know, you're plucking into.
Into a portal of the other world's muses, pouring forth every word you need for your assignment. How. What. What is even. That took me decades to realize what was even going on. And so we, we share this Mage Reagan, very profound influence for both of us, who really opened me not just to poetry, but to meditation. And specifically for me, that iteration took on a flavor or an affinity with Zen Buddhism. My question was really what. I mean, because, you know, Tokyo, Kyoto, these places are, you know, they were foundational for the transmission from India to America, Chan or Zen. And I was kind of feeling into that.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean, what's, what's remarkable about the city, a city like Tokyo, is that you have layers of time and you have old temples and shrines, you know, amid skyscrapers. And, you know, I stumbled into a little neighborhood park in Komagome during the Obon festival, you know, the Buddhist Obon Festival.
And, you know, watched women on this stage, you know, slowly dancing in a circle to, to drum and flute, and it was the Obon dance. They're each, they appear to each be both dancing alone, but dancing together. I mean, so somehow navigating alone together.
And I was mesmerized by watching this, this, this dance and the lanterns hanging from the trees and August, you know, and near the end of summer and a kind of ghostly time and the sense of spirit and something leaving and something coming and returning. But I didn't, you know, like so often, I, I was simply open to the visceral, you know, my senses and my experience without having intellectual knowledge of what I was seeing. And so I carry that experience of watching that dance, those dancers and that and the atmosphere of that park with me. It makes a huge impression without fully, without me understanding it fully.
[00:20:53] Speaker A: Sure, sure, sure.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: And then I read about the Buddhist Obon, the three day festival for the dead.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:01] Speaker B: And it's an aha moment. I read about it in Bowling Green, Ohio.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: While I'm working on a, on a two year MFA program in poetry. And I, and I think, my God, you know, but that's, you know, that's, that's me dancing with my mother on the bandstand at the corner of Maine and water in 1976 for the bicentennial celebration in Ken, Ohio, just two weeks before she got sick and went to the hospital. Ended up staying.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: Staying and never returning home again. Yeah, that's our dance. And now, you know, this Obon dance, which is evoking and inviting, as I read more, inviting the souls of our beloved ancestors to return to their homes, to come through the open doors, sit down at our tables and share food with us and, and come back into our lives and be honored watching, you know, that fest, that dance.
Even you Know, remembering it years later was a way for me to invite my mother to return to my life and to remember our dance together and to, you know, to. To learn how. What I so much needed to do was my mother. When my mother died, we had no tradition in our family. And culturally we were encouraged not to. We had no rituals to honor her and. Or to complete a mourning process. And I feel like. So I needed to be. To learn through experiences in Japan and others, how to mourn. I borrowed rituals that I. That I honor, you know, are not my rituals, you know, Buddhist Obon festival. But I can relate to them. You know, I could. I can draw out something from them to, to. Through my poem, make a kind of ritual of my own memory of my mother.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Do you have any poems that you might share that you might read?
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Sure, I'll. I'll share. This. This. This poem, Obon that is. Is a poem that I wrote making that connection between my accidental, you know, stumbling into a park during this dance and then relating it to a memory of my mother.
Obon.
In sweltering August, on the last night of Obon three day festival for the dead, I arrive in the village of Komagome.
Families sit out at night on their front porches, drinking tea or sake and tasting sweets. Wearing cotton robes they slip into after bathing. Bright, loose yukatas, doors left wide, orange paper lanterns flicker to light the way the dead are invited to return to their homes. Tables set with their favorite foods and flowers, instruments and books laid out that they might want to use again.
On the first day, the families went to meet the souls of the dead at the water's edge. And tonight they will accompany them back.
Everyone is gathered in a small park, the ground neatly raked.
Lanterns hang from trees and around a small wooden stage where women in kimonos dance slowly in a circle to the music of drum and flute.
Downtown one summer, my mother and I danced the polka on a bandstand at the corner of Maine and Water.
We galloped and spun as I held her hand, feeling the back of the nylon dress she had sewn white with a little red and blue in it somewhere.
Here the women lift their arms, appearing only slightly from sleeves where plum blossoms and cranes drop softly away.
They turn their hands like fans and dance alone.
If I could, I would find my mother's dress, pick a bouquet of dandelions and place the soft hearts of artichokes on clean, shiny plates. I would put on the mamas and the papas or blood, sweat and tears leave by the back door. The house bright and open behind me. I would walk down to where the river bends just beyond our yard, meet her at the water's edge.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: You know, I think about Mage and I think about. I think about this notion of the Mahayana and Zen.
I hesitate to do this, but, you know, when we talk about the transmission of mind to mind from mind, and we talk about it beyond words and letters, I'm not so sure that that is always a formalized student teacher, Zen teachers and student transmission, that when the student ripens, when we as students ripen and in some moment opens for us to offer or teach, that transmission of mind to mind from mind is in poetry. And that's really what I felt in your poem that you offered to me your heart in such a full way. And I received. I mean, the pause afterward was not. I mean, it was because it was being the total. I wanted to receive the totality of that.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Thank you, Joel. I mean, I feel that Mage, for so many of us, helped. He saw our hearts and, and engage and sort of offered us and showed us his heart in this exchange and guided, you know, showed us a way through poetry, give voice to our, to what, what is in our hearts.
He said to me, I remember he said to me, we were sitting on his white shag, you know, giant haired carpet in his living room.
I remember it well that always you, when you got up to leave as he was made, you carried a little bit of that carpet with you on your pants and shirts. And, you know, I called it his magic carpet. And you know, carpet that Luann, that he always said, well, Luann wanted it, but he told me it might have been six or eight months before he ended up passing away.
He said, david, you know, I feel my, my powers are lessening. You know, he. He wanted to be intentional about his, his dying, his transition. He wanted me and others he talked to. You know, it was a gift for him to talk to me about, you know, wanting, you know, when death. There's a beautiful African proverb. When death finds you, may it finds you awake. You know, he wanted us to be awake, both of us, in, in accepting and, and preparing for his transition. And I remember thinking then that he told me that and looked at me in such a way that felt like he was, you know, will you carry some of these powers with you and keep the, the torch lit, you know, for poetry? And I'm not the only one in this town. I think that, that he had this remarkable ability to, to raise up so many of us. And you're One of them too, Joel. And you're, you know, you've care. You're carrying the light of poetry that was lit like mine by. By Mage. And you know, for me, Maggie and Mage, you know, I think of them as almost, you know, my by poetry parents, you know, mother and father. Maggie maybe more of a sister. Older sister.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:29:12] Speaker B: But I wrote something recently thinking about Mage. I want to read it to you.
And it's more of a reflection than an actual poem, but it remembers Mage reading.
It remembers magic Mage giving a reading in Satterfield hall years ago with Halim Eldab, you know, a wonderful drummer in our. In our. Who also has passed away.
So I had a dream about Mage recently, a year ago. And it was. It was wonderful to have him come. Come visit me in a dream.
And I had the sense that. That he was good, that he had. That he was at peace. And all he said to me, you know, I've. I have a whole series of dreams over the last 30, 40 years that are single statements that then become mantras inside of me and become guiding, you know, riddles or reminders to me. And he simply said, you cannot touch me.
But it was spoken in such a way that it was an acknowledgment.
But what everything else I can do and that he can do for me.
So my little reflection is called Playing the Drum that I am. Because Mage leaned into me once in Satterfield on another evening of a poetry reading. And he said, poems are rough notations for the music that we are.
And then he says, I didn't say. He says, I didn't say that. That's roomy. And you know, Mage is always threading the voices of poets from, you know, a thousand years ago, or poets, you know, Daniel Thompson, poets from our community, living and dead. He was conveying our voices, threading them, weaving them, keeping them alive with. Within our hearts. Literally weaving that tapestry of what. What a. A thriving community is. Mage was doing that always in his life. So this is a little reflection.
The Mayans say that the other world sings us into being. We are its song.
Last night I dreamt about the other world. It was Mage I saw and heard in my dream.
I was grateful for him to visit me. I felt oddly comforted by the truth of what he said.
You cannot touch me. That was all.
And yet I could feel his presence and felt nourished by him. He seemed at peace.
As if with the help of a whole town of grief. Cracked voices. He had made it to the other side. And was now a beloved ancestor.
Mage has a poem about reading his poetry one night on Ash Wednesday in the Kent State Student Center, Room 310.
Accompanied by Drummer Halim Eldab, Mage writes, halim's drums are skin stretched over emptiness.
What are we?
Skin stretched taut over cheekbone, rib, knee, belly. What do you play? The whack of the living hand on dead skin. Who plays you the dead hand on the drum that you are?
I cannot touch Mage now or my mother, but they are both beloved ancestors.
I feel their hands playing on the drum that I am the other world singing me into being.
[00:33:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
