Writing His Own Stanza: Wick Poetry Center Director Followed a Winding Path Back Home

Poetry in Full Circle 

Growing up with a father who taught English for 48 years at Kent State University, the last thing David Hassler ever wanted to do was work in academia, least of all at Kent State.

He left for Cornell University in 1982, with no plans to return to Kent. But after traveling across the globe for more than a decade, fate intervened, and Hassler found himself right back where he started.

Now, Hassler has become as much a fixture on the Kent Campus as his father, Donald “Mac” Hassler, was in the English Department.

As the Wick Poetry Center celebrates its 40th anniversary, Hassler is marking the 20th anniversary of when he began his career at Wick and Kent State.

“I was determined not to go into academia because my father did, and certainly not at Kent State,” said Hassler, who for the past 15 years has served as director of the nationally acclaimed poetry center.

It was Maggie Anderson, the founding director of what was then the Wick Poetry Program, who hired Hassler in 2000 as a contractor to develop an outreach program for the Wick program. Hassler was working for the Ohio Arts Council then, as a poet in the schools.

Hassler had met Anderson years earlier through his father, when the Wick program was still housed in the Department of English. Over the years, Anderson became a friend and mentor, and she is part of the reason Hassler returned to Kent State.

“I developed a class based on a service-learning model called ‘Teaching Poetry in the Schools,’ where I trained Kent State undergraduate students to go out into the community with a teaching partner and lead workshops in schools, grades 3 through 12,” Hassler said. “It’s something I had been doing for many years in Ohio for the Ohio Arts Council, and that class became very popular. That first year, we created a program titled ‘Giving Voice,’ which culminated in a scripted sharing on campus with students, and that grew and began to include caregivers and adult seniors and veterans.” 

Poetry Transforms Tragedy

What is today the Wick Poetry Center originated in 1984, with a donation from brothers Bob and Walt Wick, who established scholarships to support undergraduate poets at the university. Bob was a sculptor and former art department faculty member at Kent State, and the scholarships were born out of a desire to honor and memorialize his son Stan (1962-1980) and Walt’s son Tom (1956-1973), both of whom died as teenagers on the same day, seven years apart.

Anderson was hired in 1989, to serve as a faculty poet, and began to grow the scholarships and other programs such as a Wick poetry reading series and a publishing program in conjunction with the Kent State University Press, which includes the Wick Chapbook Contest for Ohio poets and the national Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize for an author’s first book of poems.  

In 2004, the Wick Poetry Program was officially named the Wick Poetry Center, after the Wick brothers pledged another $2 million. That donation, 20 years ago, enabled Anderson to hire Hassler as a full-time employee to serve as program and outreach director. When Anderson retired five years later, Hassler was promoted as the new director of the center.

Another $1 million donation from the Wick family in 2023 endowed the director’s position, making Hassler the first Bob and Walt Wick Executive Director of the center.

“Poetry is a means by which a place comes to know itself,” Hassler said, quoting one of his mentors, beloved Kent poet Maj Ragain. “And I feel that Kent is fertile ground for poetry. The Wick Poetry Center has been embedded in our Kent Campus and our community. It has drawn people in from the community to the Kent Campus and taken people from the campus out into the community. It has bridged the town and the gown and has been a great value for bringing people together and building the community through poetry.” 

Healing Through Poetry  

Poetry, Hassler says, not only brings people together, but also can foster healing through artistic expression. Hassler experienced such a healing transformation firsthand.

After graduating from Cornell with his bachelor’s degree in history in 1986, Hassler spent a number of years living a nomadic existence. He drove around the country working odd jobs – waiting tables, washing dishes, painting and working as a production assistant on several movie sets in Los Angeles. In 1990, he bought a one-way ticket to Taiwan, hoping to begin exploring more of the world.

“I had reserved a room at a boarding house for travelers and had no job, but I met up with other travelers who were going to Tokyo,” he said.

After spending his first four nights in Japan sleeping on the rooftop of his boarding house during a heatwave, Hassler found a room, a job teaching English, and eventually, himself.  

“You know, being 25 years old and living in a foreign country whose language I couldn’t truly understand opened up my ability to begin to reflect on my childhood in Kent and to write about that experience through the lens of my experience of modern-day Tokyo,” Hassler said.

The experience and the loneliness forced him to deal with some of the emotional baggage he had been carrying since his mother passed away when he was 12, and as he did, the words began to flow more easily.

“I was finally beginning to write poems that made sense and that could speak to other people. It was very transformative for me,” he said.  

Upon his return to Ohio, Hassler enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts program at Bowling Green State University, and wrote a book titled “Sabishi: Poems from Japan.” Sabishi means lonely in Japanese. That collection of poems won Kent State’s 1994 Wick Chapbook contest, and winning the contest gave him enough exposure to get the job with the Ohio Arts Council as a traveling poetry teacher, which eventually led to his work at Kent State. 

Coming Full Circle

“It was the springboard for a fruitful and valuable career,” Hassler recalled.  

Since taking over the directorship, Hassler said he has focused on expanding the poetry center’s outreach into the community, including creation of the Traveling Stanzas project in 2009, which debuted as a collaboration between the center and Kent State visual communication design students.  

“This idea of Traveling Stanzas became an umbrella for one of the core missions of the Wick Poetry Center, which is to bring poetry to everyday lives and to find ways to encourage people from all backgrounds to participate in the joy of both reading and writing poetry, and using poetry as a powerful tool to make sense of their lives, to play with language and to create leaping thought,” Hassler said.

The very name, Traveling Stanzas, Hassler said, is resonant because the program brings poetry out to the community – through kiosks, posters that hang in libraries and classrooms and wrapped around utility poles in our community.  

The word stanza, Hassler said, takes on a significant meaning when one traces the etymology of the word to its original Italian.

In English, stanza refers to a section of a poem. In Italian, stanza means a small room, a living room or waiting room, such as a train station, Hassler explained. 

“This notion of traveling stanzas is to say we are bringing these moments of pause, these small rooms of poems that have been generated and created from our own community, from students and refugees and immigrants, from caregivers and patients, from veterans and older adults,” Hassler said. “We all have this birthright to use poetry as a powerful tool to not only make meaning of our lives through language, but to create connection with others or a sense of belonging.” 

Wick Gains Global Presence

Hassler attributes much of the growth and success of the Wick Poetry Center to the expansion of his staff, and their dedication and talent as published poets and educators. “The ongoing work and innovation of the Wick Poetry Center remains very collaborative and open to the contributions and ideas of its staff and the many Kent State interns who work each semester at the center,” Hassler said.

Over the past 15 years, Hassler has expanded the Traveling Stanzas program and has fostered partnerships with programs across the university as well as numerous poets and organizations nationally and internationally, which has increased the profile of the center.

“Across disciplines on our campus, we look for collaborations because we believe that poetry can be used as a powerful tool to engage people in deeper conversations around any theme or topic that they are grappling with personally or collectively within a community,” Hassler said.

On campus, the College of Nursing, the School of Peace and Conflict Studies and the May 4 Visitors Center have all become partners in poetry, he noted.

Outside of the university, those connections have produced many successful projects, including 2020’s “Dear Vaccine,” in conjunction with the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. This interactive global poetry project gave voice to our shared experience of a global pandemic.  

The “Dear Vaccine” poetry project, designed to allow participants to express their feelings of hope at the onset of the COVID-19 vaccine, was met with immense success, and collected more than 2,000 submissions from all 50 U.S. states and more than 100 countries. The poems were then edited into a book, “Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic,” published by the Kent State University Press, and later a staged performance, “What We Learned While Alone: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic,’’ which premiered at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., and then toured around Ohio.

The organization Poets for Science, a participatory poetry project exploring the connection between science and poetry, also came to be housed at Wick through a relationship Hassler cultivated with poet and environmental activist Jane Hirshfield that blossomed at the 2017 March for Science in Washington, D.C.

Poets for Science has given birth to “Dear Body of Water,” to encourage better care of the earth’s water resources, and most recently, “Shared Sky” an interactive online poetry project celebrating the science and wonder of the April 2024 total solar eclipse.

“We want to bring people an innovative way to talk about issues that they’re grappling with in their disciplines,” Hassler said. “The language of poetry can help us find a new way.”