The Untold Story of the Kent State Massacre

by Nancy Rodgers | Mar 3, 2016 | Reviews

The Untold Story of the Kent State Massacre

Screened at the KIVA, Kent State University, Sunday, May 3, 2015

This documentary features an interview with Nancy Rodgers about her experiences at Kent State where she was a math professor from 1968-78.  Rodgers had attended many of the protest rallies which were held outside her office and was at the burning of the ROTC building. The next Monday, she was a faculty observer at the Kent State shootings, which dramatically changed her life. After the shootings, she was one of four founders of the Kent Legal Defense Fund which raised money for the defense of the Kent 25. Because of her work with the Kent Legal Defense Fund, she because a target for the FBI, who wanted to discredit her because she was a professor trying to help the protestors. The FBI questioned people who knew her in her hometown and made her mother and others think she was a criminal. They told her sister to warn her that she was in danger if she didn’t stop what she was doing. They even threatened to kill her and dump her body in the river.

The documentary was produced by Elizabeth Winters’ Media Writing class at Hanover College. Their goal was to shed light on government actions at Kent State as a lesson to young people today that they always have to be on their guard to protect our democracy from officials who would stifle public protest and overstep their authority in the name of public security.

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Before the screening at Kent State, Elizabeth Winters and Nancy Rodgers made the following introductory remarks:
Elizabeth:   We’d like to tell you how we got involved in this documentary, which was produced by my Writing for the Electronic Media class last winter at Hanover College.

Nancy:  I taught at Kent State from 68-78 and was a faculty observer at the shootings, which like everyone else who was there that day, changed my life forever and how I view the world.  I hope that someday in the near future, historians will be able to reveal the historical facts about the federal government’s involvement at Kent State, like Seth Rosenfeld did in his marvelous book The FBI’s War on Radicals.  After 4 lawsuits and 30 years of research, Seth accumulated tens of thousands of pages of previously unreleased FBI documents in which he exposed numerous illegal and criminal acts the FBI was doing in Berkeley. And I’m sure J Edgar was doing the same thing here at Kent.

I wanted to do a documentary with John Dean because I thought he was one of the few remaining people who might be able to shed some light on the federal government’s involvement in the events at Kent State.  I had collaborated with Elizabeth on another educational video about Isaac Newton,  which was broadcast by PBS in Indiana.  Elizabeth is very talented.  She worked for eight years as a documentary producer for Florida Public Television, and when I met her at Hanover College, where she’s now chair of the Communications Department, I was surprised to find out that she also has Kent connections.  Back in 1970, her father, John Allensworth, was teaching at Kent in the Geography Department –

Elizabeth:  – and my mother was an operating room nurse at Robinson Memorial Hospital where the students were brought, and she later went on to receive her PhD from Kent and taught in the KSU Dept. of Education.  ​ In addition to growing up in Kent with both of my parents teaching at Kent State, I got my B.A. and M.A. in Journalism here.

Nancy:  Because of the Kent connection, I asked Elizabeth if she would work with me in trying to do a documentary with John Dean.  I pitched her by telling her various conspiracy theories about John Dean and Kent State.  For example, he was with J Edgar Hoover that weekend in Yale, and some people say that he flew to Cleveland on Sunday. I pointed out articles on Dean’s Watergate-Ethics course, which indicated that he might be willing to talk, and Dean’s article in support of Occupy Wall Street where he describes his role during the Vietnam War protests as being “as close to the situation as one can get, where he could see both what was occurring on the streets, and what was occurring behind closed doors in the government.”   I then told Elizabeth my personal story about what I had been through at Kent to try to convince her that federal agencies were heavily involved at Kent State.  At the end of my pitch, she told me that she thought my story was more interesting.

Elizabeth: While Nancy was giving her pitch… I was fascinated not so much by John Dean, although that was interesting… but by everything she’d gone through.  I thought… this is incredible.   Is there evidence?   I wanted to know more.   I wanted the story recorded.  And I didn’t want to wait.  I had a Media Writing class that had just finished a more traditional documentary project… with narration and interviews edited together.   I was already planning on assigning them to script a studio-based program, so I decided this would be a great learning experience.

Of course, they had to do a tremendous amount of research in order to be able to tell the story and to ask the right questions because we were recording it as a live broadcast with no edits afterwards.  When the students started researching… some of them became mesmerized by the story.  Especially Zach Ashton… the student you’ll see hosting the program.  It was the first time he had ever done anything on camera.  He was so into the research and so wanted to do it… and that’s part of the charm.   This it isn’t a polished piece. … it’s student work.  BUT… there is such an interesting story at the heart of it.  My staff members who were helping out that day were just floored.  They’d never heard the Kent State story told this way, and we knew our cable channel audience would be interested… as I hope you are today.

Nancy:  After the screening, Elizabeth will talk about the project as an example of how the Kent State shootings can be used in classes as a teaching tool and its relevance for students today.

The Selected Poems of Wang Wei

by Jack Ramey | Apr 26, 2015 | Reviews

I was first introduced to the poems of Wang Wei by my friend and fellow poet, George Kalamaras, when he mentioned that Wang Wei was his favorite Chinese poet in a poetry reading at the Village Lights Bookstore.   George, who is the Poet Laureate of Indiana, also featured Wang Wei in one of his video blogs on A Gray Barn Rising, which he started to help “bring back to life those poets who are not as widely read as they should be.”

Do yourself a favor, and pick up a copy of one of the many translations of Wang Wei’s poetry. George recommends Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei, translated by Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, and Xu Haixinet. But for my money, you cannot go wrong with David Hinton’s fine translations in The Selected Poems of Wang Wei.

Wang Wei lived in the 8th century during the Tang Dynasty in China.  After an arduous education, he passed the difficult exams to became a prestigious scholar-official in the government with a reputation as a talented poet, painter, and musician.  Later in life he retired from his position to live alone in the mountains above the city, living a monk-like existence, practicing Cha’n (Zen) Buddhism, walking in the Way of the Tao, and continuing his poetry. His concise poems paint pictures of nature that evoke spiritual or metaphysical analogs to Taoist and Buddhist thought. Solitude and detachment became his great themes in his later years.

In one of his most famous poems, “Deer Park,” a section from the cycle called Wheel-Rim River, emptiness, solitude, and tranquility are held up as ideal states of beingness-in-the-world.

Deer Park

No one seen. Among empty mountains,
hints of drifting voice, faint, no more.
Entering these deep woods, late sunlight
flares on green moss again, and rises.

The poet is alone, almost dissolving into and merging with the empty mountains and deep woods, becoming one with nature and the sunlight that flares as his soul is ablaze with true being.

Similarly, in another poem, Wang Wei tells his readers the choice he made in leaving the life of the city behind for the tranquility of the rivers and mountains.

Back Home in the Eminence Mountains

I left all that, followed a crystalline river
into thick woodlands, idleness deepening.
It seems the current is thinking of home,
and near nightfall, birds return. I pass
an overgrown town, ancient river-crossing,
then it’s dusk flooding autumn mountains
where I am back home again, far far away,
closing my gate beneath towering peaks.

The school of poetry (and painting), if one may call it that, practiced by Wang Wei and his contemporaries, Li Po and Tu Fu, is known as Shan Shui which is usually translated as Rivers-and-Mountains. Deceptively simple depictions of tall empty mountains cut through by rivers and streams, are largely devoid of humans. Nature is seen as the transcendental essence of the soul of the universe, and the poet often paints himself as a spirit erased and dissolving into oneness with the outer and inner landscape that surrounds him and becomes him.

It has been noted that Wang Wei was one of the first Chinese artists and poets to paint with brush or words the inner landscape of the natural world. Landscape becomes inscape as in this fine Zen/Taoist meditation poem:

Climbing to Subtle-Aware Monastery

A bamboo path begins at the very beginning,
wanders up past Chimera City to lotus peaks
where windows look out across all of Ch’u
and nine rivers run smooth above forests.
Grasses cushion legs sitting ch’an stillness
up here. Towering pines echo pure chants.
Inhabiting emptiness beyond dharma cloud,
we see through human realms to unborn life.

Sitting on the grass, emptying out his being in pure zen (ch’an) meditative stillness, Wang Wei becomes one with the mountains and rivers and pine forests and reaches a state of satori where he sees past the veil of human illusion and into the eternal consciousness, the “unborn life.” The word empty or emptiness as a state of (non)being recurs over and over again in his poetry. It is a condition to be strived for, to long for: to become empty of all desire and thought and to dissolve oneself into the essence of the natural/spiritual world.

The same thematic repeats itself in A Meal with Kettle-Fold Mountain Monks, but the emptiness and stillness of spiritual oneness with nature is counterpointed with a social meal with some monks during the late afternoon. They share a dinner of pine nuts and then “read books revealing Way/until daylight begins to fade.” Then:

Lamps are lit,
and then at nightfall, chime-stones sing out
and I understand how stillness is itself pure
joy. Life here has idleness enough and more:
how deep could thoughts of return be, when
a lifetime is empty appearance emptied out now?

Wang Wei’s poems are not dated, so we do not know with accuracy when they were written during his lifetime, but there are autobiographical statements in many, and Hinton has arranged the poems so that they seem to chronicle a life in poetry. Towards the end of this volume we encounter poems of his twilight years and old age where idleness, stillness, silence, and emptiness are what he values most.

The Way It Is

Faint shadow, a house, and traces of rain.
In courtyard depths, the gate’s still closed
past noon. That lazy, I gaze at moss until
its azure-green comes seeping into robes.

One can imagine that a Vice-Magistrate named Chang tried to lure him back into civil service, and he replies in the following poem telling Chang what it is he values most now in his life in the mountains. The ch’in mentioned in the poem is a Chinese stringed instrument that Wang Wei was skilled at playing. During the Tang Dynasty, Chinese poets often sang their poems like medieval troubadours with their lutes or ancient Greek poets with their lyres. The “ten thousand affairs” in line two echoes the language of Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching.

In Reply to Vice-Magistrate Chang

In these twilight years, I love tranquility
alone. Mind free of all ten thousand affairs,
Self-regard free of all those grand schemes,
I return to my old forest, knowing empty.
Soon mountain moonlight plays my ch’in,
and pine winds loosen my robe. Explain this
inner pattern behind failure and success?
Fishing song carries into shoreline depths.

Hinton’s selected poems of Wang Wei ends with what could be taken as one of his last poems, a poem of old age, a beautiful poem that recognizes what is truly valuable in a lifetime spent in solitude and Zen/Taoist contemplation. His poetry and paintings for which he was famous during his own lifetime seem now to belong to another life altogether.

Off-Hand Poem

I’m ancient, lazy about making poems.
There’s no company here but old age.
I no doubt painted in some former life,
roamed the delusion of words in another,
and habits linger. Unable to get free,
I somehow became known in the world,
but my most fundamental name remains
this mind still here beyond all knowing.

His name indeed still remains. Over one thousand years after his death, school children in China are required to read, memorize, and recite his poems. If school children in this country were required or encouraged to do the same, instead of playing horrific video games, the object of which is to kill other human beings, perhaps our culture of mind-numbing violence might eventually evolve into something more moral and spiritually fulfilling.

Translating is a tricky business, especially from a non-Indo-European, tone-rhythm  language like Chinese. Most good translators are keen to preserve the original intent of the poem and also to indicate formal concerns like rhythm, line length, or rhyme. Translations of the same poem often vary widely. But David Hinton’s translations, I think, are a great beginning where you can enter into the world of Wang Wei’s Taoist and Zen poems that penetrate into the stillness and depth at the core of the world’s essential oneness.
The Selected Poems of Wang Wei
Translated by David Hinton.
New York: New Directions, 2006.
ISBN 978-0-8112-1618-0