Prairie Zen: Building a Book of Haiku from the Northern Illinois Landscape

A prairie can look empty if you move through it too quickly. At walking speed, it becomes crowded.

Grass moves differently from one patch of ground to another. Birds announce territories invisible to human eyes. Weather can be seen approaching long before it arrives. A pond changes after thunder. A heron seems to construct itself from the same gray air surrounding it. The ordinary business of plants, animals, water and weather becomes almost inexhaustible once someone decides to stand still and pay attention.

That act of attention is at the center of Prairie Zen, a developing collection of haiku by Rockford poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg. Planned for publication in 2027 by Wolf Twin Books, the book grows from years of observing the landscapes of northern Illinois and the greater Midwest, including the prairies, wetlands, woods, creeks, roadsides and restored natural areas surrounding Rockford. The project is particularly connected to the kind of landscape preserved at Severson Dells Nature Center, where the supposedly quiet world of prairie and woodland turns out to be anything but quiet.

One of the central ideas behind Prairie Zen is that haiku doesn't require an exotic landscape. The astonishing thing can happen almost anywhere. A summer storm, a pond, a blackberry or an abandoned glove can be sufficient material if the poet notices the moment when an ordinary thing becomes briefly unfamiliar.

summer storm
the roofer runs
across the sky

after thunder
the pond returns
one frog at a time

Those poems establish something important about the developing collection. Nature in Prairie Zen isn't presented as a pristine realm separated from human life. Roofers, farmers, roads, towns and abandoned objects occupy the same world as frogs, birds, weather and fields. The Midwest of the book is inhabited and worked upon, sometimes damaged and sometimes reclaimed. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

That mixture produces some of the collection's most characteristic images. Human structures don't necessarily disappear when people abandon them. Instead, other forms of life begin using them differently.

the empty silo—
a spiral staircase
made of sparrows

abandoned platform—
the arriving train
rewilds

The first poem transforms an agricultural structure without denying what it once was; the second compresses an entire ecological reversal into the unexpected verb “rewilds.” In both, the human world remains present, but it has lost its exclusive claim on the landscape. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

This is not, however, a collection interested only in environmental recovery or pastoral beauty. The natural world in these poems can be comic, indifferent, violent, mysterious and occasionally unsettling. A robin's egg can be destroyed by the same weather that makes a prairie beautiful. Darkness itself can appear alive.

hailstorm—
the robin’s egg
opens the wrong way

eel river—
darkness
learning to swim

That is one reason “Zen” in the title shouldn't be mistaken for uncomplicated serenity. The poems repeatedly ask the reader to accept what is actually present rather than demand that nature become comforting. Birth, death, predation, decay, weather and renewal occupy the same landscape. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

The prairie also offers something especially useful to haiku: enormous scale and tiny scale existing simultaneously. A person can stand beneath a sky that seems to cover half a continent while noticing one bird, one insect or one movement in the grass. Vaultonburg repeatedly moves between those dimensions.

across the prairie—
rain arriving
on horseback

fog drift—
a spider tests the air
with one leg

The first poem makes distant weather enormous and almost mythological. The second reduces the field of attention to a single leg extended into moving air. Both begin with observation, but neither stops at literal description. The image is allowed to make the imaginative leap. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

Again and again, animals become the means through which the landscape briefly rearranges itself. A heron isn't merely standing in fog; it seems to be made from it. A horse barely moves, yet that movement changes the perceived silence around it.

marsh fog—
a heron
assembled from gray

night pasture—
a horse shifting weight
thins the silence

These are small moments, but smallness is not the same thing as insignificance. Haiku depends upon the possibility that concentrated attention can temporarily alter scale. Three lines can contain a pasture. One bird can reorganize the morning. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

There is humor here as well, and that may be essential to the project's idea of Midwestern Zen. Enlightenment, if it occurs at all, doesn't always arrive beneath a perfectly flowering tree.

evening pasture—
a cow’s slow gaze
untangles my hurry

prairie wind—
my hat
becomes a pilgrim

The first poem gently reverses the usual relationship between human observer and animal. The cow isn't hurried; the poet is. In the second, the prairie offers its lesson by simply stealing his hat. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

Prairie Zen is still being assembled, which means its final shape remains open. But the poems already suggest what kind of book it wants to become: not simply a collection of nature haiku, and not a guidebook to northern Illinois, but a record of what sustained attention can reveal about a familiar landscape.

Perhaps the philosophy of the project can be reduced to one of its smallest poems:

empty basket—
carrying home
the birdsong

Nothing has been collected. Nothing has been removed from the landscape. Yet the observer does not return empty-handed. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

That may be the bargain at the center of both haiku and walking through a prairie. Pay attention long enough, and eventually you bring something home.

Prairie Zen by Thomas L. Vaultonburg is currently in development for publication in 2027.

 

SECOND NATURE: Salvaged-Metal Sculpture Meets Haiku in Rockford

For Rockford's Fall ArtScene, three local artists brought together two art forms that don't ordinarily share the same room: salvaged-metal sculpture and haiku. SECOND NATURE, presented at Rockford Art Deli, was a collaboration between metal sculptor Michael Zant and poets Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré. The exhibition paired Zant's handmade animal sculptures with original haiku written in response to the individual pieces, creating a show in which metal and language continually changed the way viewers looked at one another.

The premise was deliberately simple. Zant creates animals and other forms from discarded and repurposed metal. Vaultonburg and Tré each wrote haiku responding to those creatures, with the resulting poems displayed alongside the sculptures. Neither poet was attempting to explain Zant's work. Instead, the poems offered additional ways into it—sometimes playful, sometimes contemplative, sometimes concerned with the actual animal represented in the sculpture and sometimes inspired by the strange second life of the materials themselves. The exhibition also benefited Wild Roots, connecting artwork about wildlife with an organization devoted to helping actual wild animals.

Michael Zant's salvaged-metal sculpture taking shape in the workshop before SECOND NATURE.

Zant's sculptures begin far away from the finished environment of a gallery. Steel scraps, rebar, chain, old tools and pieces of machinery acquire unexpected second lives in his workshop. What was manufactured for one purpose becomes a foot, wing, shell, tail, beak or body. The transformation made haiku an unusually natural companion to the work. Haiku asks a writer to pay close enough attention to an ordinary thing that it becomes strange again. Zant accomplishes something similar physically. An object so familiar that we barely notice it anymore is cut, welded and rearranged until suddenly there is an animal standing in front of us.

Importantly, the original material never entirely disappears. A chain remains recognizably a chain even when it has become an animal's tail. A fork can still be a fork while simultaneously functioning as part of a creature. Rebar retains its industrial identity while becoming bone, leg or spine. That tension between what something was and what it has become is central to the work. The viewer's eye moves back and forth between the illusion and its construction: animal, scrap metal, animal again.

Three of Michael Zant's creatures—frog, turtle and salamander—before their installation at Rockford Art Deli.

Seen together on Zant's worktable, the sculptures reveal something that can become less obvious once artwork reaches a gallery: these objects were unmistakably made by hand. Welds remain visible. Steel retains scratches, discoloration and evidence of previous use. Familiar manufactured objects peek through the anatomy. Rather than concealing those histories, the sculptures make them part of the animals' personalities. A turtle assembled from metal remains unmistakably a turtle, but look again and the illusion breaks apart into individual remnants of human industry. Look once more and the turtle returns.

For SECOND NATURE, Vaultonburg and Tré generally approached each sculpture independently. Rather than collaborating on a single poem that told the viewer what the sculpture meant, each poet was free to discover something different in the same creature. Their haiku were printed on small individual tiles and displayed with the artwork. A visitor could therefore encounter Zant's sculpture, then one poet's response, then the other's, creating a small three-way conversation among object, language and observer. The poems weren't labels. They were additional acts of attention.

The collaboration also produced Wild Cogs, a small haiku chapbook by Vaultonburg and Tré created for the exhibition. Its title captures much of the central idea and humor of SECOND NATURE. The mechanical and natural worlds aren't necessarily opposites here. A manufactured object can become part of an imagined ecosystem. Something discarded can acquire another identity. The cog becomes the creature, and the boundary between human debris and animal form becomes unexpectedly porous.

There was another dimension to making wildlife the center of the exhibition. Proceeds from SECOND NATURE benefited Wild Roots, giving the project's transformations a practical connection to the living world outside the gallery. Representations of animals assembled from discarded human materials could, in a small way, help people caring for actual wildlife. That gave the exhibition's title another meaning. Second nature usually describes something practiced until it becomes instinctive, but here it could be read almost literally: nature made a second time.

A piece of metal is manufactured, used and eventually discarded. Someone picks it up. Michael Zant sees an animal in it. Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré look at that animal and find poems. Eventually the whole strange chain of transformations arrives in a gallery in downtown Rockford, where someone else looks at it and sees something none of the three artists anticipated. For an exhibition constructed largely from objects that had already lived one useful life, that seems exactly right.

SECOND NATURE was presented at Rockford Art Deli, 402 E. State Street in downtown Rockford, as part of Fall ArtScene 2026.

 

Hike You!: Six Years of Haiku and Photographs from Rockford

For six years, Rockford poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg walked the streets, alleys, riverbanks, neighborhoods, industrial corridors, and forgotten spaces of his hometown with a camera and a notebook. The result became Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford, an exhibition presented at RevHaus during Rockford’s Fall ArtScene.

The project began simply enough: walk through Rockford and pay attention.

Over time, those walks produced an unusual record of the city. Rather than concentrating on familiar landmarks or picturesque views, Hike You! often turns toward the things people ordinarily pass without noticing: an abandoned office chair, a bicycle pulled from the river, the remains of an estate sale, municipal infrastructure, discarded objects, vacant spaces, weeds, weather, and the evidence people leave behind.

Vaultonburg paired photographs from these walks with haiku and short poems. The combination creates something between documentary photography, poetry, and a personal geography of Rockford.

The exhibition included 24 finished pieces drawn from approximately six years of walking and observation. Among them were works titled “Office Chair on Broadway,” “Bicycle From the River,” “After the Estate Sale,” “Municipal,” “The New Owners,” “The Freezer,” and “Archaeology.”

The subjects aren't necessarily extraordinary. That is part of the point.

Haiku traditionally depends upon attention: noticing a moment closely enough that something apparently ordinary opens into something larger. Hike You! applies that principle to a Midwestern city. Rockford isn't treated as scenery behind the poems. The city supplies the poems.

A Different Kind of Nature Walk

Vaultonburg's recent haiku has increasingly concerned itself with the natural world of northern Illinois—prairies, rivers, birds, insects, trees, weather, and the landscapes surrounding Rockford. Hike You! approaches nature from another direction.

Here, nature and the human world are constantly colliding.

Plants reclaim neglected property. Weather works on abandoned objects. Animals occupy spaces people have left behind. A discarded object becomes part of a landscape. Something ugly becomes funny, mysterious, or unexpectedly beautiful when encountered at walking speed.

That attention to the overlooked has long been central to Vaultonburg's poetry. In Hike You!, however, the physical city becomes part of the composition.

Walking matters, too.

A city experienced through a windshield is different from a city experienced on foot. Six years of repeatedly walking the same general territory allows tiny changes to become visible: something disappears, something grows back, a building changes hands, an object appears beside the road and is gone the following week.

Taken together, the photographs become an accidental historical record of Rockford.

Poetry Made in Rockford

The exhibition also belongs to a larger period of activity for Vaultonburg and artist and poet Tré, whose collaborative work has increasingly combined poetry, visual art, nature, and public space.

During the same Fall ArtScene weekend, their haiku appeared in SECOND NATURE at Rockford Art Deli, where poems were paired with salvaged-metal sculptures by Michael Zant. Their work also appeared as part of a public installation at the Rockford Public Library.

But Hike You! is perhaps the most specifically Rockford-centered of these projects.

There is no imaginary landscape behind it.

The streets are Rockford streets. The river is the Rock River. The alleys, houses, weeds, discarded furniture, industrial remnants, birds, sidewalks, and changing neighborhoods belong to the place where the poems were written.

That specificity is important because regional art doesn't have to make its subject grander than it is. Sometimes the more intensely local the observation becomes, the more recognizable the experience becomes to everyone else.

Six Years of Looking

The final exhibition at RevHaus condensed thousands of walks and observations into 24 pieces.

Filmmaker Ryan Davis also documented the project, adding another layer to an undertaking that had begun privately and incrementally: one person walking around his hometown and noticing things.

That may ultimately be the simplest description of Hike You!.

It is six years of looking.

And it makes an argument—quietly, repeatedly—that a person doesn't necessarily have to travel somewhere exotic to find material worthy of poetry. There is enough strangeness, beauty, humor, loss, nature, history, and accidental composition within walking distance.

You just have to keep walking long enough to see it.