Poetry in Photography

"The main task for the Haiku poet," Veda explained, "is to immerse himself into the heart of an object or an incident ... and to catch the impersonal mood it shares with the universe." - Colin Westerbeck quoting Veda who wrote the essay "Basho on the Art of the Haiku: Impersonality in Poetry"

quotes taken from Westerbeck writing about the Poet Basho's influence on the photographer Yasuhir Ishimoto in a book of Ishimotos photography under the title "Yasuhiro Ishimoto"

... the profound perceptions of the poet can be sustained only for a few moments at most. His revelations are but a glimpse into the nature of things.

If you get a flash of insight into an object, ... let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write ... never hesitate at that moment. The instantaneous quality that the composition of the poem must have makes it like leaping at a formidable enemy, ... or like biting into a pear.

" ... simply observe what children do," Basho says.

The poet does not flee from the world of ordinary men; he is in the middle of it, understanding and sharing the feelings of ordinary men; he has only to be a bystander, who calmly and smilingly observes them.

Sleep Deprivation: part 1

(in 3 parts)

written September 6, 2008:

In attempt to help my wife out, I agreed to get up in the middle of the night in order to check on the tomato “sauce” that was cooking in the oven all day and all night. We wanted it to be “thick” so that when we made pizza later this year, the sauce did not run like water out over the crust and onto the pan. We baked that sauce – I checked on it twice during the night – and it got scorched.

So we had the necessary discussion regarding the potential benefits and inconveniences of canning one’s own food. For instance, does it really save money? This depends on how much time one invests in obtaining the vegetables, like, say, hours and hours invested in a garden. Or if one buys vegetables at a competitive Farmer’s Market, or if one lives within a network of family and friends who share crops and labor. Till one obtains all the “necessary equipment”, like, say, a large stainless steel pot in which to cook sauce down properly, and a kitchen large enough to stash the canning supplies, and room to work – by then perhaps one’s children are grown and gone. Is a half day in the kitchen making 6 half pints of relish worth about 4 dollars that you have saved?

Although canning in our time is hardly efficient, we decide, other imbedded values dust off our resolve to keep trying. Our generation is not a canning generation. Our grandparents preserved food in glass Ball jars as a way of life. Our parents canned as an option which they were largely excited about foregoing when faced with the grinning canned goods so accessible in the supermarkets. Today we can food only by a conscious effort of squeezing a few spare hours to invest in saving ourselves from being devoured by a thoughtless consumption that makes Wal-Mart possible. But it is work and it is time.

Canning food brings awareness. Spending time selecting vegetables, sorting, washing, cutting, cooking, canning and shelving; one enters a process and develops a relationship with the canned product – we commune with the earth and its fruit. Jars are reused year after year.

Tonight we rode on a horse-drawn wagon through the late-summer Pennsylvania countryside. It had rained all day – a good ground-soaking rain that eased days and weeks of parching ache. The huge black haunches of the work horses bulged and strained easily in the harness until sweat glistened in the twilight. They moved our loaded wagon easily through the rolling hills of color saturated by the sudden clearing of the rain and the evening light among the wet air. We passed through tall straight rows of corn, dark green and yellow; the brown thatch of dried summer grass; the bright green of recently sown buckwheat. Everywhere moisture and light gave visible life to the network of plant life. Faces were happy and thoughtful, at ease on this placid ride.

Dog Ownership II

-posted by Olivia-

I plead guilty as charged to lobbying for a dog. My punishment? Getting to live with what I lobbied for.

Bob Dylan was awfully cute and frisky at the breeders. We picked him out of the tumbling pack of pups because he seemed to be the most outgoing. He was just a bit bigger than his brothers and sisters. The biology major in me should have known—he was a dominant male—but I was taken by his friendly tail and curiosity.

All through chief year, my stay-at-home husband looked glummer and glummer as the winter months marched by and more and more muddy paw prints accumulated on the linoleum and wood flooring. I could tell how many times Matthew had to clean up after “THE DOG” by the tightness of the lines on his face when I walked in the door after work.

Like a good working spouse, I pleaded Dylan’s case. “Let me work with him,” I’d say, remembering with fondness my preteen years with Banjo, my childhood Shetland Sheepdog. Banjo and I were great buddies. I taught him to sit, shake, and even jump through a hoop. I dreamed of dressing as a clown, with Banjo doing tricks as a sidekick. I even checked out books about magic tricks at the library and gave a matinee with my obliging cousins as an audience. We were both innocent of the great cataclysmic turn my life was about to take: late adolescence with its hours cooped in my bedroom, studying, practicing the violin, and dreaming about guys.

I thought I could still codger up some of my old dog-training finesse, though. Armed with Matthew’s hand signals and leash, I took Dylan on a walk. Did I forget to mention I was pregnant at the time? I thought my lower back would never recover. By then, Dylan was a good sized adolescent Golden Retriever. He pulled me around the block, and almost induced a healthy episode of emesis from his expecting companion when he made a healthy deposit on the sidewalk. “You mean,” I the working spouse thought to myself, “Matthew has to scoop this stuff up with a little baggie every time it happens?”

Needless to say, I didn’t walk Dylan much more after that. Even the removal of both of his testosterone producing organs could not quell his spirit. My abdomen only got more ponderous, and Maggie was soon born, so I had plenty of excuses. When Matthew had his last Existential crisis with the DOG question, I decided I had to be more helpful. We bought a training collar, and I resolved to learn to use it.

Dylan has been making slow and steady progress with Matthew’s training, and they (usually) have mutual love for one another. I harbor a sneaking suspicion, however, that Dylan has viewed me as “one of The Master’s pups” ever since he laid eyes on me. Whenever I try one of Matthew’s hand signals, Dylan gets a big grin on his furry face and maws at my hand. When I try to make him sit to put on the training collar, he deftly chomps on the collar and tosses it effortlessly away from my frantic graspings. “No, Dylan, Off!!!,” I squeal.

Usually, I come into the house in despair and enlist Matthew the Master’s help.
Today was no different. I got past my habitual fears of running in the cold. “Do I have to run outside today?” I ask Matthew. “Every time you come in from running outside, you thank me for making you go,” he replies. I bundled up to face the November chill, and grabbed the leash. FAILURE. Every attempt to place the training collar over Dylan’s head was met with happy, chomping teeth.

Matthew came out onto the porch with his flannel pajama pants and sweatshirt on. “You’ll have to be more stern with him!” he said, invoking the usual argument we have over dog parenting. (He thinks it works to spank, and I don’t). “That doesn’t work for me!” I glare. Matthew stands by while Dylan—now obedient in the presence of the Great Master—allows the placement of the collar. We are off!!!

We jog over the mighty Susquehanna, and down a side road with old houses on one side and a field on the other. I remind myself not to panic with the cold blasts of air and the tightenings of my stomach muscles as I breathe. I practice making my voice deeper, more assertive. “No Dylan, HEEL!” I think about how stressful it is to face exasperated parents, how much I wish I could do everything perfectly, and how deeply I wish people would forgive me when I can’t. I remember an article I read from a journal for women in the medical profession. The author writes about female physicians needing to lobby for workshops in assertiveness training at their workplaces.

“Hey,” I think to myself, “Dylan is my own personal assertiveness training!” Dylan and I jog down the road. He buries his nose in the snow like a doggy snowplow as we trek along. I feel refreshed, renewed, and ready to face just a few more days of coughs, runny noses, and tight schedules.

We round the corner, and there are the remains of a dead animal on the road. Dylan is overcome with glee. He rubs his head and body repeatedly in the roadkill before I can realize what is happening. A greasy man in a pickup roars by, grinning at me, the yuppy with my disobedient dog. I try to grin—assertively—back. “No Dylan,” I squeal, dragging him away from the grime. He continues to seize in pleasure. “NO Dylan!” I squeal a little louder. The doggy seizing continues. I reach into the deepest hollows of my soul, past my anxieties, past my niceness, and pull out a roar, “NO DYLAN! COME!!!” He stops seizing, rights himself, and resumes a trot by my side.

We re-cross the Susquehanna and turn down the block toward home. We have a lot of work to do, but I am grateful for this furry beast and the lessons we have to learn together.

so this past weekend we made our third trip to Ohio in as many months - (we keep vowing to end our travel habits as Maggie has been on 5 big trips in her first 4 months) this time primarily for my cousin's wedding - it was also the only weekend in the near future that my sibs were going to be in one place so we went ahead and held the "Wenger family Christmas", sandwiched in a few hours on Sunday morning, between a busy wedding weekend where our quartet sang (after not singing for months and months) and Dawn leaving for Canada. hurray for the little family time that we have now . . . but at least we have it, and our family is as good as the next. a few pics from the weekend and this week:



on the way home Olivia made me stop and photograph this post-election sign specifically for Jen & Darren

Mom and Maggie happily reunited.

Lyric gets to eat pop tarts for breakfast for the first time since we left Ohio (Mom needs to adjust the toaster)

as per Marty tradition, he immediately wears as many of his Christmas gifts as possible - this time his sweater, shirt and pants strikingly remind us of L. L. Bean and he grabs a piece of wood to complete the image.

Olivia reads her two daughters a bed-time story while Dad exercises Dylan - eventually we'll get 'em all tucked in.

Darren: a poetic-historical exploration

Anyone who knows Darren has undoubtedly encountered and appreciated his unique view of the world - a view that he expresses candidly with his prolific writing and photographic ability. However, few of us have been priveleged to see Darren himself scrutinized by the camera lens. In attempt to fill that gap, I am posting pictures of "the big D" made a few weekends ago, positioned alongside text written by Darren himself. I've taken the liberty to extract quotes from several papers he has written over the past 5 years. It is my hope that these glimpses, while taken out of context, remain true to who Darren is, historically, presently and poetically.

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A guest editorial by Olivia follows . . .

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I cannot completely articulate or recover the origins of my faith. Yet I believe I am a product of the Truth, both poetic and historical, I have observed and absorbed. I can Live only in the present. And at present this is what I believe.



Life on this earth is impermanent.

We are all alive – more or less, and . . . all of us can fly.

I will not be content to define my self merely as a socio-cultural product in which I exist as a single event in a sea of dialectical impulses (or do I?)

I am not simply an individual member of a conservative Anabaptist sect, or even a single schizophrenic citizen of two kingdoms simultaneously. Rather I am a contradictory and somewhat ambiguous amalgamation of all sorts of processes.

I would like to think I comprise one part and at the same time the whole of my community – by internalizing, reformulating and contributing to the chemistry of Mennonite ideology and society.

As I search for what gives me meaning and purpose, I want to think carefully about why I chose Jesus as an archetype of right living, justice and salvation.

Am I a Mennonite because I am afraid to be alone? Is it possible to be alone?

I hope to move beyond the simple and comfortable empiricist mode of thought toward a more relational or dialectical approach to identity.

Although I’m still a boy, I feel as though I am beginning down the path of Life and Truth.

I cannot know about worlds to which I have not yet been exposed. I can only analyze the possibilities.

This is how I live, by choosing to follow life from tree to tree, flitting from relation to relation and back in a constant flow, measuring truth against truth and settling only to be upset(tled).

I want every day to be a new day when there’s a distilled sense of perception, a spare- ness, every line firm, irredundant, and the cherry blossoms are beginning to bloom, and nothing is wasted or unseen.

I would like to be able to make an intensely individualized art meaningful to the world.

The flourishing of any genuine work of art depends on its roots in native soil. “We are plants which - whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not – must with our roots rise out of the earth in order to bloom in the ether and bear fruit” . . . The problem is to recover a viable homeland in which meaningful roots can be established. Place construction therefore is about the maintenance of roots and the art of dwelling.

It is a novel wonder of basic sensation to observe the quotidian world – to look across a measured space and to be undistracted by the convention of signs and traffic lights and Sikh taxis and Mexican scaffolding, by your own sputtering mind, sorting schedules that simulate spreadsheets, and by the energy people make, lunch crowds with razor sharp cell phones cutting through traffic like nobody’s business, the lion roar of buses on the brake, Nigerian bike messengers bound by chains of paper pettiness, all that consciousness powering down the flumes of Manhattan, the tumultuous center of the “knowing” world, so that it is impossible to see that across the street the ghost of the moon is rising over a moon temple masquerading as a Harlem tenement.

What I have written is not my final or completely articulated situation, but it is close to my heart and my idea of Truth.

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Darren is the kind of person whose thoughts will drive the next social uprising.

I see a Mennonite father, the former owner of a Holmes county bulk food store, approaching Darren’s desk.

“Sit down,” Darren says. He turns in his swivel chair—upholstered in leather even though his wife is vegetarian—and tilts his head. “What can I do for you?”

The Mennonite father fingers his shirt collar nervously. He looks across the desk at Darren’s Party uniform. He clears his throat.

“Well, I ah, came to ask you for help with getting visas for my family. The new laws won’t let us own the store anymore, and yesterday some of our neighbors broke into our garage and took the food we had kept. We would like to leave. I thought you might understand, because…ah…your father…and…growing up like us…and”

Darren lifts the cigar he had been smoking before the man’s entrance from the ashtray. His lips are set in a line. He thinks about borders between countries and crossings and fathers. His eyes are cruel, but objective to their cruelty, like the eyes of a lioness ripping into her prey. He takes a long, quiet, drag on his cigar.


When the Mennonite Big Bang happened, Darren somehow ended up on a meteor heading top speed toward the limits of outer space. And yet, he looks pretty good with a beard. I wonder how he will bring the contradictions of himself together some day. He has determined to leave the traditions of Anabaptism behind, yet declares the dogma of Community from a lonely pedestal in the urban wilderness and wants to lose himself in the midst of the deep cultural traditions of an Asian tribe. He butchers any weaknesses he sees with bloodthirsty relish, but the only hint of these serial killings is a flicker of condescending light in his eyes. He holds his victims in an unforgiving grasp—brutally kicking them as they lie curled on the floor. But he will never be convicted in a court of law and will soon have the confidence to spurn the courts of religion too.

If Darren were a panther in the zoo, I’d sit there on a bench and watch him pace for a long time. I’d even write a poem about him, like Rilke, and give it to his wife. She would be another animal in the zoo I’d like to watch for awhile, but being behind bars would be so painful for her she’d flutter helplessly against the cage until she her feathers were broken and her song silent. I’d have to wait until no one was watching and steal the keys to her cage.