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.

 

Prairie Zen: Five More Haiku from the Midwest

Prairie Zen begins with a simple proposition: the ordinary world is enough.

It doesn't require a temple, a distant mountain, or a landscape untouched by people. In the Midwest, the natural and human worlds have been tangled together for generations. Fields meet subdivisions. Birds nest in abandoned buildings. Goldenrod takes over vacant lots. Creeks run beside highways. Trees outlive fences, farms, houses, and sometimes the people who planted them.

Prairie Zen pays attention to that world without demanding that it become prettier, purer, or more profound than it already is.

This is particularly suited to a place like Rockford and northern Illinois. We live in a landscape people frequently underestimate. There are no oceans or dramatic mountain ranges demanding attention. Much of what happens here happens quietly: weather crossing a field, weeds reclaiming disturbed ground, an old orchard surviving after the road to it has disappeared.

The poems below offer five more ways of approaching Prairie Zen.

1.

pasture fence—
one walnut tree
older than the wire

Three lines contain two different understandings of time.

The fence represents the human landscape: property lines, ownership, agriculture, division. Someone decided where one piece of land ended and another began and stretched wire across it.

The walnut tree belongs to another chronology.

It was there before the boundary. If the fence eventually rusts into the grass, the tree may still be there afterward.

Prairie Zen frequently notices this difference between human time and landscape time. Our arrangements can seem permanent because they last longer than we do. The landscape has another definition of permanent.

2.

subdivision dusk—
fireflies returning
to no field at all

This is Prairie Zen after development.

The poem doesn't pretend the subdivision isn't there, nor does it turn into a lecture about what replaced the field. Instead, it watches the fireflies return.

That word—returning—carries the poem.

The insects behave according to an older map. Their presence briefly reveals another landscape underneath the one we have constructed.

This is important to Prairie Zen because nature isn't somewhere else. It persists in drainage ditches, yards, vacant lots, highway margins and subdivisions. The distinction we make between the human world and the natural world is considerably cleaner than the world itself.

3.

farm auction—
the lilacs
staying put

This one is almost brutally Midwestern.

A farm auction marks an ending. Machinery, furniture, tools and possessions accumulated across a life can be tagged, priced and carried away by strangers.

The lilacs aren't participating.

They remain beside the house.

There is sadness here, but the poem doesn't instruct us to be sad. That's another characteristic of Prairie Zen: emotion can emerge from accurately observing the world instead of being announced by the poet.

The auction disperses one human life.

The lilacs bloom where they were planted.

4.

drainage ditch—
a mallard pair
lower their standards

Prairie Zen also needs this poem because Prairie Zen cannot be allowed to become unbearably solemn.

The joke depends upon our hierarchy of landscapes. A pristine wetland is beautiful. A drainage ditch is infrastructure. Surely respectable ducks should have better accommodations.

The ducks don't care.

To the mallards, water is water.

There's something quietly useful in that. Human beings spend tremendous energy ranking places, experiences, careers, possessions and ourselves. The mallards encounter a ditch and see somewhere to land.

Sometimes enlightenment has webbed feet and questionable real-estate standards.

5.

vacant lot—
goldenrod
without witnesses

This might be one of the purest Prairie Zen poems in the larger group.

A vacant lot is defined in human language by absence. Something should supposedly be there—a house, a store, a factory, a parking lot—but isn't.

Goldenrod has a different assessment.

It flowers.

And the final line removes us from the equation altogether. The goldenrod doesn't bloom so someone can appreciate it. Beauty doesn't require an audience. The world doesn't become meaningful when a human being arrives to observe it.

Indeed, the poet's greatest accomplishment here may be noticing something that would have happened exactly the same way without him.

A Zen Native to This Place

Prairie Zen isn't an attempt to paste an imported spiritual vocabulary over the Midwest. It grows from looking closely at the place itself.

The prairie has already been plowed, fenced, paved, abandoned, replanted and developed. Rivers have been redirected. Factories have closed. Farms have become subdivisions. Vacant lots have become small accidental prairies. Yet everywhere, other lives continue negotiating with what we've made.

The walnut tree outlasts the wire. Fireflies return to the missing field. Lilacs remain after the auction. Mallards accept the drainage ditch. Goldenrod flowers without anybody watching.

There is no pristine world to return to.

There is this one.

Prairie Zen begins there.