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.
