SECOND NATURE: Salvaged Metal Sculpture and Haiku at Rockford ArtScene

This fall has developed in a way I did not particularly plan. What began as several separate projects—walking, writing haiku, making books, collaborating with other artists, paying attention to the animals and landscapes around Rockford—has gradually begun to look like one larger body of work. The connections were probably there all along. I just hadn't necessarily thought of them as parts of the same thing.

The newest manifestation of that work is SECOND NATURE, a collaboration between Rockford metal artist Michael Zant and poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg for Fall ArtScene at Rockford Art Deli. SECOND NATURE pairs Zant's salvaged-metal sculptures of animals with original haiku. Each sculpture is made from reclaimed and repurposed materials: old metal given another life as claws, wings, paws, fur, bone and muscle. Each animal is then paired with a poem responding to the creature rather than simply describing the sculpture.

The exhibition is also a benefit for Wild Roots, whose work with injured and orphaned native wildlife gives the project another natural connection. The Rockford Area Arts Council describes the exhibition as celebrating "the wild lives around us" and "the possibilities of discarded things." I couldn't come up with a much better description of what Michael and I are trying to do. Something discarded isn't necessarily finished. Something overlooked isn't necessarily unimportant. Sometimes it just needs to be encountered differently.

There is something appealing to me about making an animal from material that has already had another purpose. A piece of steel doesn't stop existing because a machine, chair, tool or piece of equipment has outlived its usefulness. It simply becomes available for another interpretation. Michael sees a claw where somebody else sees scrap metal. Eventually a collection of those transformations becomes a bear, a bird or an opossum.

Possum sculpture by Michael Zant

The same thing is probably true of places. For more than six years, photographer Ryan Davis and I have walked Rockford making Hike You!, a collaboration of photographs and haiku based on familiar streets, alleys, riverbanks, buildings and overlooked objects. That project will also appear during Fall ArtScene, at RevHaus. We have walked many of the same streets dozens or even hundreds of times, and the strange thing is that repetition doesn't necessarily make them less interesting. Sometimes familiarity eventually circles around and becomes mystery again.

That is remarkably close to what is happening in SECOND NATURE. In one project, an ordinary street becomes strange again because somebody stops long enough to look at it. In another, discarded metal becomes an animal because somebody sees a possibility that wasn't obvious before. Both projects are concerned with reclamation in one form or another, and in both cases the process begins with attention.

Over the past several years I have increasingly used the phrase Prairie Zen to describe this approach to my haiku. Prairie Zen isn't a doctrine, and I'm not particularly interested in turning it into one. It is an attempt to locate the contemplative impulse of haiku in the landscape where I actually live: Midwestern woods, prairie remnants, drainage ditches, county roads, riverbanks, abandoned things, birds, insects and animals. It is a Zen of bur oaks and utility poles, turkey vultures and strip malls, railroad tracks and vacant lots.

The central idea is probably that nothing has to become exotic before it becomes worthy of attention. A rusted fencepost can be enough. A possum can be enough. A bicycle pulled from the Rock River can be enough. A weed growing through concrete can be enough. You don't have to travel halfway around the world looking for a sacred landscape if you're willing to entertain the possibility that you're already standing in one.

That sensibility has increasingly become the connective tissue among these projects, and it is also central to my newest book, Vanished Roads. Published this summer by Wolf Twin Books, Vanished Roads collects 104 haiku and short poems moving through woods, prairies, abandoned roads, animals, weather, grief, humor, memory and renewal. The book is illustrated by Tré and represents perhaps the clearest expression so far of the kind of poetry I've been moving toward.

I didn't write Vanished Roads as a manifesto for Prairie Zen, and I don't want to retroactively turn it into one. The poems came first. The terminology arrived later as I began noticing what I kept returning to: impermanence, overlooked objects, Midwestern landscapes, animals, strange little collisions between the natural and human worlds, and the possibility that something ordinary can suddenly become luminous if you happen to catch it at the right moment.

That makes this fall feel less like a collection of unrelated appearances and more like an interesting convergence. Hike You! takes the idea into the streets of Rockford through photography, walking and haiku. SECOND NATURE brings it into collaboration with Michael Zant's salvaged-metal animals and the wildlife rehabilitation work of Wild Roots. Vanished Roads gathers another part of that landscape into a book. Wolf Twin Books gives the work a home from which it can continue developing.

I don't know that any of this needs to be tied together more neatly than that. In fact, I'd rather leave some room around it. A book, a walking project, a salvaged-metal wildlife exhibition, photography, haiku, Rockford, the prairie, things discarded and found again. They seem to recognize one another.

Perhaps that is what SECOND NATURE means to me more than anything else. Not returning something to what it was, but paying enough attention to discover what else it might become.

 

Hike You!: The Bicycle That Came Out of the River

Some objects become symbols because somebody deliberately makes them symbols. Others just show up.

This bicycle came out of the Rock River.

By the time Ryan Davis photographed it, it was standing in front of the old Rockford Register Star building, looking less like a bicycle somebody might ride than something the river had made. Mud coated the frame. Rust had gotten into it. Whatever ordinary life it had once possessed was over. Someone had pulled it from the water and propped it upright, and there it stood: wrecked, filthy, strangely dignified.

We kept seeing things like this because we kept walking.

That is where Hike You! came from. Ryan and I spent years walking Rockford together, often covering the same streets and paths again and again. The exhibition is about what happened when repetition stopped making those places more familiar and instead made them increasingly strange: two people taking “the same steps in the same town” until ordinary Rockford became “new and mysterious... and magical.”

It wasn't conceived as a documentary project. We weren't compiling an inventory of Rockford landmarks or trying to photograph the city's most photogenic places. We walked. Ryan carried a camera. I carried whatever it is a poet carries around in his head. Things presented themselves.

A rock. A discarded vacuum cleaner. An old theater marquee. Something dragged from the bottom of the river. The eventual subjects of Hike You! could be beautiful, ridiculous, damaged, historic, nearly invisible or all of those things at once. Even magnet fishing at Fordham Dam became part of the vocabulary of the project: “dragging rock bottom / we reel in rusty remnants / of the Screw City.”

The bicycle was different.

By then, both Ryan and I were in motion ourselves.

We had previous lives behind us. Versions of ourselves, expectations, habits, destinations. Neither of us was simply walking around Rockford for exercise. Without necessarily announcing it to ourselves at the time, we were walking into new lives. The walks became part of that transition. So did the photographs. So did the poems.

And there, outside the Register Star, was this bicycle that had literally been pulled up from beneath the surface of the city.

It had been somewhere else.

Now it was here.

That was hard to miss.

The haiku that emerged from the photograph was:

a little mud in my
gears won't make me forget my
heart is the motor

I like that the poem doesn't pretend the mud isn't there.

There is mud in the gears. Of course there is.

Transformation is frequently described as though the old life simply falls away and the new one begins cleanly. That wasn't what this bicycle suggested to me, and it wasn't what our lives looked like. You bring things with you. Some damage remains. The gears grind. The frame shows where it has been.

But the heart is still the motor.

The bicycle became one of the pieces that most clearly expressed something I gradually understood about the larger Hike You! project. We thought we were repeatedly walking through Rockford, but Rockford was also providing us with a language for understanding what was happening to us.

The city was full of metaphors we hadn't asked for.

That mattered particularly in this location. Behind the bicycle stands the former Rockford Register Star building, itself a monument to a Rockford that was already changing. In front of it is an object recovered from the Rock River. And somewhere between the old newspaper building, the river mud, the rusted bicycle, Ryan's photograph and my seventeen syllables were two people trying to figure out what came next.

There was no reason to know, when we started walking, that any of this would become an exhibition.

That is one of the things I love most about Hike You!

It emerged.

A walk became another walk. A photograph became a poem. Familiar streets became unfamiliar. Things we'd passed dozens of times suddenly demanded attention. Eventually we had accumulated evidence of something neither of us had quite intended to make.

The project's subjects can appear almost comically insignificant. That's part of its philosophy. The Times Theatre doesn't need a magnificent restored marquee to become worthy of attention; its modest one can resemble “the proud grin of a third child / missing their first tooth.” A dirty bicycle doesn't have to be repaired, polished and returned to the road before it can tell you something about continuing.

Sometimes you get dragged out of the river covered in mud.

Sometimes somebody stands you back up.

And sometimes that is enough to begin again.

Hike You!
Thomas L. Vaultonburg + Ryan Davis
Fall ArtScene 2026 — Rockford, Illinois

 

Moonscape: A Year of Haiku Under the Same Moon

MOONSCAPE HAIKU PHASE I is the first of three collaborations in Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré's “SCAPE TRILOGY” series, but the book began with something much simpler: two longtime friends, separated by distance, looking at the same moon.

For one year, we wrote.

The idea behind Moonscape was to create a series of paired haiku moving through the calendar and the phases and mythology of the moon. One poem would encounter another poem. One imagination would answer another. Tré then created the illustrations that transformed those exchanges into their own strange visual landscape.

The result was Moonscape: Haiku Phase I, published by Wolf Twin Books in 2022.

The book moves chronologically from January through December. It begins with “Wolf Moon / Ōkami Lune”, travels through Snow Moon, Worm Moon, Pink Moon, Flower Moon, Strawberry Moon, Hunter's Moon, Beaver Moon, Cold Moon and dozens of stranger places in between.

There are coyotes and ravens. Wolves and dragonflies. Robots and black holes. Koi, ocelots, resurrection lilies, vampires, shadows, carnival rides and lost socks.

In other words, eventually we wandered pretty far from the moon.

But we always found our way back.

That wandering became part of the point.

Moonscape isn't really a collection of two people attempting to write traditional nature haiku side by side. The moon provides the gravity, but the poems are allowed to orbit wherever they want. Pop culture enters. Science enters. Buddhism and mythology enter. Friendship enters. So do jokes, memories, animals, monsters and whatever else happened to cross our paths during the year.

The visual world of the book developed the same way.

Tré's illustrations use bold blacks, whites and velvety fields of gray to create what we described as massurreal landscapes—places that seem simultaneously familiar and impossible. Some are playful. Others are eerie. Some feel almost like images recovered from dreams. Across the book, the poems and pictures begin functioning less as separate elements than as parts of one continuing conversation.

And conversation really is the key to Moonscape.

One of my favorite things about the book is that neither poet is simply illustrating what the other has already said. The pairings can agree, contradict, tease, echo or wander away from one another entirely. Sometimes the connection is obvious. Sometimes the reader has to find it.

That was intentional.

In the book's three-part dedication and acknowledgment, we thanked the moon itself—humanity's first timepiece and one of its oldest sources of inspiration. We also acknowledged the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, who more than a century ago challenged American poets:

“Pray, you try Japanese Hokku (Haiku), my American poets!”

We did.

Not by attempting to impersonate poets from another century, but by seeing what two contemporary American poets could make from the form in their own time, with their own lives, obsessions, humor and friendship.

The third part of the dedication probably explains the book better than anything else:

“In the end, Moonscape is a love letter of enduring friendship.”

That's what it became.

A year-long record of two people noticing things and sending those observations back and forth.

A celebratory journal.

A playground of words and pictures.

And a reminder that friendship doesn't necessarily require two people to occupy the same physical landscape.

Sometimes it only requires them to look up.

MOONSCAPE HAIKU PHASE I
Thomas L. Vaultonburg & Tré
Cover design and illustrations by Tré
Wolf Twin Books, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-218-04516-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022914098

Moonscape is the first volume of Thomas & Tré's SCAPE TRILOGY.

 

Small Songs for Weary Travelers: Finding a Larger World by Making Life Smaller

There is a sentence near the beginning of Small Songs for Weary Travelers that explains almost everything that follows:

“In late 2019 I went from having a very large life to having a very small life.”

 

Thomas L. Vaultonburg's Small Songs for Weary Travelers, published in 2023, is a book of haiku, but it is also the record of what happened after that sentence became true.

The introduction describes a period of contraction. Whatever plans existed for returning to a larger world were interrupted when, only a few months later, the world itself contracted. The pandemic closed doors that were already closing. Vaultonburg's response was counterintuitive: instead of fighting immediately to make his life larger again, he deliberately made his field of attention smaller.

“So I did the only thing that made sense in a world that had suddenly gotten small,” he writes. “I went even smaller.”

That decision is the beginning of Small Songs for Weary Travelers.

Vaultonburg studied Buddhism and Zen, although he describes the process less as conversion than assimilation: Zen simply became his “default setting.” On January 1, 2020, he began writing only haiku. The restriction produced an unexpected freedom. If the body could not travel freely through the world, attention still could. Words could. Imagination could.

And then something else happened. He reconnected with one of his oldest friends, Tré, and the two began a creative collaboration. The world eventually reopened, but by then Vaultonburg discovered that he no longer particularly wanted the old large world back. He preferred this one: a smaller world populated by Bashō, Issa, Buson, a creative partner, animals, trees, rivers, moonlight, tea, and whatever happened to wander across the trail that morning.

That history matters because otherwise Small Songs can be mistaken for a collection of individually clever nature poems. It is much more coherent than that.

It is a book about learning to inhabit what remains.

The World Hasn't Gone Anywhere

Nature in these poems is rarely scenery. The animals and plants are doing things entirely independent of the poet, and quite often they seem considerably wiser than he is.

One of the funniest examples occurs during the apocalypse:

the world is ending
and yet my aloe blooms have
heard nothing of this

The joke is excellent, but the idea underneath it is central to the collection. Human catastrophe is not necessarily universal catastrophe. We announce the end of the world when what we frequently mean is the end of our arrangement with the world. Meanwhile, aloe blooms.

The trees aren't particularly impressed with us either. In “origin,” human beings go looking for their roots while the trees, which actually have roots, politely suppress their amusement.

Again and again, the nonhuman world quietly corrects human self-importance.

A stone can remain silent for aeons and reveal itself when placed against a breast. A stream patiently transforms an arrowhead into a pebble that can become a baby's rattle. Wind rearranging fallen leaves turns out to be an architect.

These aren't poems about conquering nature, deciphering nature, or even escaping into nature.

They are poems about getting over yourself sufficiently to notice it.

That distinction is important.

Zen With Mosquitoes

There is Buddhism throughout Small Songs for Weary Travelers, but mercifully little interest in behaving like a holy man.

Vaultonburg's Zen contains mosquitoes, tacos, dung beetles, gift shops and occasional profanity.

In “Gift Shop,” a master's book about austerity sells briskly in the zendo gift shop. In “rooftop,” Buddhas ride bicycles while other Buddhas eat tacos. An octopus writes perhaps the most concise spiritual instruction in the entire collection with her ink: “stay the fuck away.”

And “reductio ad zendo” reduces spiritual instruction until almost nothing remains:

there is nothing you need to do
there is nothing you need
there is nothing

The humor isn't decoration pasted onto the philosophy. It is part of the philosophy.

A writer can make Zen unbearably solemn very quickly. Vaultonburg seems constitutionally incapable of allowing that to happen. Every time enlightenment threatens to become grandiose, a possum gets into the garbage.

That may be one of the book's greatest strengths.

The poems aren't asking the reader to transcend ordinary existence. They continually push the reader back into it.

The Bestiary

There are enough animals in Small Songs to populate a peculiar ark: wolves, bears, crows, coyotes, foxes, possums, rabbits, trout, catfish, ocelots, beetles, dragonflies, cicadas, hummingbirds, mosquitoes, skunks, hawks and numerous others.

But they aren't symbols in the conventional poetic sense.

Coyote is Coyote.

Possum is Possum.

The mosquito wants blood.

The trout eats the mayfly.

The poet doesn't demand that nature conform to human morality before he agrees to love it.

One of the most revealing poems in the book may be “nothing personal”:

but i love you said
hare to wolf, AND i love you
too said wolf to hare

That is funny until you think about it.

Love does not eliminate appetite. Affection doesn't cancel mortality. The wolf remains a wolf and the hare remains lunch. Small Songs repeatedly refuses the sentimental version of nature in which everything exists to reassure the human observer.

The book's natural world is beautiful precisely because it doesn't need us.

And Yet This Is a Love Book

For all the animals, Zen jokes and wandering, another presence gradually becomes impossible to miss.

There is a “you.”

And that “you” changes the scale of the book.

Early in the collection, “abundance” offers a wonderfully modest inventory:

leaves for my water,
a pen, your smile.

Later, an entire philosophy of sufficient existence emerges in “juniper”:

i can live in a
world as small as you and i
and that juniper

That may be the emotional center of Small Songs for Weary Travelers.

The small world introduced at the beginning of the book is no longer a deprivation.

It has become enough.

This is where the book's title begins to acquire its full meaning. The traveler isn't necessarily somebody crossing continents. Travel can mean surviving time. Moving through grief. Entering another season. Walking beside someone. Becoming someone slightly different from the person who began the journey.

And companionship does not end the journey. It changes what traveling means.

“If I die on the road with you,” one poem says, “I do not die / I become the road.”

That is a remarkably large idea for seventeen or so syllables.

The Screw City Is Still in There

For all its forests, rivers and spiritual wandering, this is also unmistakably the work of a Midwestern poet.

Corn appears. So does the Rock River. So does Blackhawk. So does the Screw City itself.

In “Magnet Fishing At the Fordham Dam,” dedicated to Ryan Davis, the poet drags the river bottom and pulls up “rusty remnants / of the Screw City.”

Elsewhere, the landscape becomes “miles of corn and hogs' / blood down the slaughterhouse / drain.”

This isn't imported Japanese scenery dressed up as Midwestern haiku. Vaultonburg borrows a poetic tradition but writes from where his feet actually are.

That is one reason the book works.

Bashō's road does not run through seventeenth-century Japan anymore.

Here it runs past Fordham Dam.

The Old Poet Didn't Completely Disappear

Readers familiar with Vaultonburg's earlier poetry will recognize another tension running through the collection.

The guy who wrote the older poems is still in there.

He hasn't suddenly become a serene nature poet incapable of cynicism, anger, lust, absurdity or black humor. He has simply acquired another way of looking.

Occasionally the old voice erupts spectacularly.

A blobfish knows nobody is coming into the abyss “to sort their shit out.” Humanity becomes carbon life “broil[ing] / under an angry heat lamp” until somebody announces, “ding! all finished.”

But those moments no longer dominate the landscape.

That's the important transformation.

The darkness hasn't been disproved.

It has been put into proportion.

There are flowers here too.

There is water.

There is another person.

There is tea.

There is an extremely persistent possum.

Small Songs

The final effect of reading more than two hundred pages of Small Songs for Weary Travelers is surprisingly cumulative. Any individual poem may occupy only a few lines, but together they begin to resemble footsteps.

One.

Then another.

Then another.

The book even tells us what to do when direction fails. In “get lost,” the universe keeps changing the signs until the speaker discovers he is “home everywhere.”

And near the end comes “Unravel”:

as i unravel
I become miles of new thread
to weave with again

That poem could almost serve as an alternative introduction to the entire collection.

Something unraveled.

A life became smaller.

Then the world became smaller.

Instead of pretending none of this had happened, the poet followed the loose thread.

He followed it into Zen and haiku, into woods and rivers, into a renewed creative partnership, into Wolf Twin Books, and eventually into this book. Even the physical object acknowledges that companionship: Tré designed the cover, and Small Songs is dedicated simply “For Tré.”

By the end, the smallness introduced on the first page no longer seems small at all.

That may be what Small Songs for Weary Travelers ultimately understands better than most books about renewal: a life does not necessarily have to become what it was in order to become large again.

Sometimes recovery of the world happens at the scale of a haiku.

A crow.

A river.

A cup of tea.

A juniper.

Someone beside you.

And one more step down the road.

My Absolutely True Alice's Restaurant Story

 My Absolutely True Alice's Restaurant Story

I grew up with Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree." I knew the song. I knew the movie. I knew about Alice and Ray living in the old church and Arlo getting himself into trouble because of a large quantity of garbage.

This becomes relevant.

I met Jenny at Castaways, a dive bar in Rockford that my brother and I owned. She came in with a group of women who were organizing the Rockford Rage Roller Derby, and I believe she was something like the fifth woman to join the league. Castaways became their unofficial headquarters for a while, and Jenny was one of the people who started turning up regularly. I didn't know it then, but our orbits were on a collision course for the next fourteen years.

After Castaways closed its doors, I was between lives. Jenny had done some posters for the Rage, and I remembered liking them, so one day I contacted her on MySpace. This was when contacting someone on MySpace was a perfectly reasonable thing for an adult to do.

I told her I was working on a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z and asked if she might be interested in illustrating it. "Working on" is probably generous. I had an idea for a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z, which is not exactly the same thing as having a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Less than a week later, Jenny sent me an illustration for the first poem, "A is for Asparagus." It was perfect.

Page 1 from Atrocious Poems A to Z

This presented me with an immediate problem because now I actually had to write the book.

So I did.

Jenny and I began spending more time together, and eventually I learned that she and her husband Dan lived in an old Lutheran church in Pecatonica, Illinois. The first time I walked into the place, I knew immediately that I had entered Alice's Restaurant.

Not metaphorically. I mean there was the church.

It still had its stained-glass windows. It still had a stage at the front where sermons, performances, announcements and whatever else Lutheran congregations do from stages had once emanated. The building was enormous, but Jenny and Dan essentially lived in only two areas of it. Most of the rest of the building was still just this cavernous old church surrounding the relatively small portion where two people were actually conducting their lives.

And I had seen this movie. I knew where this kind of thing could lead.

At first the similarities were amusing. Arlo had Alice and Ray living in a church. I had Jenny and Dan living in a church. There were artists and unconventional people involved. There was a general feeling that ordinary residential architecture had somehow been rejected as insufficient for the situation.

Then I learned another little detail. Arlo Guthrie and Alice Brock had written a children's book together, Mooses Come Walking. Jenny and I were writing a children's book together.

Now, I am willing to tolerate a certain amount of coincidence from the universe. You have to. Otherwise you start becoming the kind of person who finds messages intended specifically for you in the license plates of passing automobiles.

So I let that one go.

Eventually Jenny invited me over to mow the lawn. This is one of those sentences that doesn't sound particularly important when you say it, but in retrospect there aren't that many people in your life whose lawn you begin mowing at an old Lutheran church.

Shortly after Jenny and I had become very close, Dan, who had been the city manager of Pecatonica, got a job in the oil industry in Houston. They were moving to Texas, and they were moving fast. So fast, in fact, that they hired me to clean out the church.

This is where anyone familiar with "Alice's Restaurant" should begin experiencing some concern on my behalf.

There was a lot of stuff in that church. Some of it had apparently been sitting in the basement for decades. There were books, paperwork, glassware, and assorted objects whose usefulness had expired so long ago that nobody was quite sure what their usefulness had originally been. Much of it was already moldy and unpleasant before I ever touched it.

I hauled it out. And hauled it out. And hauled it out.

Eventually I had everything that needed to go outside, bagged and ready for the city to collect. Jenny and Dan were headed for Houston. The church was cleaned out. My work was finished.

Except it wasn't.

Because a thunderstorm came through.

The rain soaked the garbage. Now, garbage that has been sitting in the basement of an old Lutheran church for several decades is not improved by the addition of water. Nobody has ever opened a bag containing moldy paperwork, old books and miscellaneous church debris, poured several gallons of rainwater into it and said, "There. Much better."

The city of Pecatonica took one look at the situation and declined to take the garbage.

It would have to be rebagged.

And this was the moment when the universe stopped being subtle.

I had grown up listening to "Alice's Restaurant." I knew exactly what happened when Arlo Guthrie had to get rid of the garbage from Alice's church. I had been aware of the parallels from the first time I walked into Jenny's church. But up until this point, they had been cute.

Now I was being sent back to a church to deal with a municipal garbage problem.

There are billions of people on Earth. Most of them will live their entire lives without having this experience.

I drove back to Pecatonica, bought industrial garbage bags, and spent about half a day taking decades' worth of rain-soaked, moldy Lutheran garbage and putting it into new bags so the city would agree to haul it away.

No police officers arrived. I was not arrested. There were no aerial photographs. There were no twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows. Nobody asked me whether I had rehabilitated myself.

I just rebagged the garbage.

Eventually the city took it away.

As far as I know, this leaves Arlo Guthrie and me as two of the very few people in American history who have found themselves involved in a complicated garbage-disposal situation arising from an old church occupied by unconventional people, with the added coincidence that both situations somehow involved children's books.

Arlo got a song and a movie out of his.

I got Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Jenny spent the next two years in Houston. When she returned, we began our life together. So unlike the movie, this wasn't the end of anything. It was the beginning. But before any of that could happen, the garbage had to be picked up.

And apparently, if you live in an old church, there's only one kind of person you should call when that happens.

Arlo Guthrie wasn't available.

Review of Vanished Roads By Conrad Sienkiewicz

 Review of Vanished Roads By Conrad Sienkiewicz

“Vanished Roads” by Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a fantastic collection of just over 100 haiku. Many are in the traditional format of 5-7-5, yet those with fewer syllables really show off Vaultonburg’s skill in doing more with less. Some of his haiku have only four words, yet the mark they make upon the reader is palpable. What Vaultonburg can do with merely four words is impressive and enviable!

Buy Vanished Roads From Wolf Twin Books

Some haiku in this collection are humorous, while others are more somber and reflective. All show a keen eye for nature and an appreciation of life in all forms.

Through his poetry and his fine skill with words, Vaultonburg gives us a magical world, where hats become pilgrims, coyotes deliver sermons, furniture grows teeth, and buckets carry stars.

Vaultonburg’s best efforts can comfortably rest alongside those of other haiku masters, such as Basho and Issa. His haiku “ripe figs” recalls William Carlos Williams’ icebox plums.

Read altogether, the poems feel like a hike through the woods, with occasional stops in more civilized environs. The simple illustrations by Tré that pepper the book complement some of the poems without distracting us from the words.

Illustration "The Mountain Path" by Tré from page 81 of Vanished Roads.

You can also read Conrad's review at Goodreads

Five Haiku By Thomas L. Vaultonburg That Explain Prairie Zen

 

Five Haiku That Explain Prairie Zen

Prairie Zen is less a philosophy than a way of paying attention. It borrows something from Zen—the suspicion that the world does not require our explanations in order to be complete—but locates that attention in the ordinary landscapes of the Midwest: fields, roadsides, birds, weeds, creeks, farmyards, weather, abandoned things, and the small animals going about their business while human beings remain convinced everything is about us.

There are no mountaintop monasteries required. Prairie Zen can happen beside a drainage ditch or behind a grocery store. Its central gesture is decentering the self. Nature isn't scenery arranged for our contemplation, and it isn't obligated to become a metaphor for whatever we're feeling. The field doesn't need us. The bird doesn't know it has entered a poem. The world is already happening. The poet's job is sometimes simply to become quiet enough to notice it—and occasionally to recognize the comedy of having thought himself important in the first place.

These five haiku approach that idea from different directions.

1.

first frost—
I thank the field
for not needing me

This may be the most concise statement of Prairie Zen in the collection.

Human beings are accustomed to placing ourselves at the center of the landscape. We cultivate fields, name rivers, build roads through forests, and then speak as though the world has acquired meaning through our presence. This haiku reverses that relationship. The field's indifference becomes a gift.

There is liberation in discovering that the world doesn't require your supervision. Frost comes. Grass dies back. Seeds wait. Spring eventually returns. None of it asks whether we're ready.

Prairie Zen finds comfort rather than insult in that fact.

Small Songs For Weary Travelers By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

2.

wrong turn
right sunrise
and nothing to fix

The poem begins with one of the fundamental human assumptions: I have made a mistake. By the third line, the entire premise has disappeared.

The road may be wrong according to the itinerary, but the sunrise doesn't know that. The distinction between the correct road and the incorrect one exists entirely inside the traveler.

That is an important Prairie Zen idea. It doesn't mean that choices have no consequences or that direction never matters. It means that our categories—success, failure, progress, delay—aren't necessarily categories the world shares with us.

Sometimes the wrong road contains the right sunrise.

Nothing needs to be repaired.

3.

beetle crossing—
I slow my whole life
to match its pace

Here the hierarchy between observer and observed collapses.

Normally the beetle would be the insignificant thing. We are busy. We have somewhere to go. The insect crossing our path is almost beneath notice. Instead, the speaker accepts the beetle's measurement of time.

For several seconds, the beetle determines the speed of the universe.

That reversal is quintessential Prairie Zen. Attention makes the supposedly small world enormous. The poem doesn't ask the beetle to teach a lesson. It doesn't turn the beetle into a symbol. The speaker simply agrees to inhabit its pace.

The encounter changes the person, not the beetle.

4.

empty basket—
carrying home
the birdsong

Prairie Zen repeatedly questions what it means to possess something. Here, materially, the speaker returns with nothing. The basket is empty. Yet the journey has hardly been unproductive.

This is abundance without acquisition.

You cannot put birdsong in a basket. You cannot keep it, sell it, preserve it, or prove that you possessed it. You can only have been present when it happened.

That distinction matters. Prairie Zen isn't an argument against the material world; it is an argument for noticing how much of our lives consists of things that cannot become property: weather, light, birdsong, silence, companionship, a particular afternoon.

The empty basket comes home full.

5.

old monastery—
a fox sleeping
through enlightenment

And this is where Prairie Zen reveals that it is willing to laugh at Zen itself.

Human beings construct monasteries, develop doctrines, write books, meditate for decades, debate enlightenment—and somewhere nearby a fox goes to sleep.

Perhaps the fox has missed enlightenment.

Perhaps the fox has understood it perfectly.

The poem wisely refuses to decide.

That humor is essential to Prairie Zen because taking one's own spirituality too seriously is another way of putting the self back at the center of everything. The fox doesn't need a philosophy explaining how to be a fox. It doesn't need to transcend its foxhood. It sleeps.

Meanwhile, we're still inside the monastery trying to figure things out.

The Prairie Is Already Doing It

Taken together, these poems suggest what I mean by Prairie Zen. It isn't a doctrine and shouldn't become one. There are no commandments, membership requirements, or correct interpretations. It is closer to a habit of attention: notice what is actually happening before deciding what it means.

A field doesn't need you. A wrong turn can be sufficient. A beetle can determine the pace. An empty basket can contain birdsong. A sleeping fox may know something the monastery doesn't.

The landscape doesn't promise enlightenment.

It offers something better.

It keeps happening.