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 haikuists Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré of Wolf Twin Books 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