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.

 

In Defense of the Unnecessary Sentence

There are easier ways to spend an afternoon than reading poetry.

You could organize the garage.

Learn a marketable skill.

Watch a video titled Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Who Wake Up at 4:00 A.M.

Instead, someone sits down with a poem.

For a few minutes, absolutely nothing measurable happens.

No shelf gets built.

No lawn gets mowed.

The GDP remains stubbornly unchanged.

Yet somehow the world has one more person who noticed the way rain sounds on a metal roof, or remembered their grandmother's kitchen, or paused long enough to wonder why crows always seem to know more than they're telling us.

Literature has always suffered from this problem.

It refuses to justify itself in practical terms.

A novel cannot patch your roof.

A sonnet will not rotate your tires.

A haiku won't remind you where you left your car keys.

What literature does instead is preserve attention.

It reminds us that looking closely is not the same thing as wasting time.

In an age that rewards speed, literature quietly rewards patience.

That seems like a fair trade.

So here's to the unnecessary sentence.

May there always be writers willing to write it, editors willing to publish it, and readers willing to stop long enough to let it do its quiet work.

 

Prairie Zen: Finding the Extraordinary in the Midwest

When people hear the word Zen, many picture distant mountains, bamboo forests, or carefully tended Japanese gardens. I think Zen is closer than that.

It lives in limestone creek beds after a hard rain.

It waits in restored prairie grasses bending beneath the wind.

It watches from the fence post where a red-tailed hawk settles over an Illinois field.

Prairie Zen is the practice of paying attention to the landscapes many people drive past without seeing. It isn't about escaping where we are. It's about inhabiting it completely.

My own haiku grew out of the forests, rivers, rail corridors, and changing seasons of northern Illinois. These places taught me that stillness isn't reserved for monasteries. It exists beside county roads, beneath cottonwoods, in forgotten cemeteries, and along the Rock River.

A prairie has its own silence.

Its own weather.

Its own way of teaching impermanence.

Rather than searching for enlightenment somewhere else, Prairie Zen asks a simpler question:

What happens if we truly notice the place we already call home?

That question lies behind much of my recent work, including Vanished Roads. The poems are rooted in the Midwest—not as scenery, but as a living practice of observation. Every bird call, every shifting cloud, every abandoned road becomes an invitation to pay closer attention.

Zen has always emphasized direct experience.

The prairie offers it freely.

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Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a Rockford, Illinois poet, founder of Zombie Logic Press, and author of Vanished Roads and other collections exploring haiku, nature, and the evolving idea of Prairie Zen.

Rockford Pages Captain Thomas L. Vaultonburg Writes Second Children's Book

Rockford Pages poetry slam team captain Thomas L. Vaultonburg has written his second children's book, titled Atrocious Poems A To Z, and it will available on Amazon June 9th. 

Also, Vaultonburg has been invited to write the 26 poems that comprise the book on the wall of the Rockford Art museum to accompany the illustration by Rockford artist Jenny Mathews. 

The exhibition, titled Bittersweet Observations, will have a public opening June 9th at 6:30 P.m., and copies of the book will be available in the gift shop at the Rockford Art Museum afterwards. 

Atrocious Poems A To Z is a book Vaultonburg began writing in the 5th grade at Mary Morgan Grade School in Byron, Illinois, as a class project. He always wanted to finsish the book and see it in publication, and almost forty years later his dream has come true.

Eye Rhyme is an example of the poems in the book. It has an ingrained literary lesson as well as attempting to deal with issues that are anxiet-inducing for children. "I wanted to write something that would be in opposition to all the shut the fuck up and go to bed books being aimed at children," Vaultonburg said in a phone interview. "The stresses of childhood are very real and serious for children, and as adults we form this sort of parental amnesia where we forget how hard it is being a child. I wanted to take those everyday stresses seriously, but not too seriously."

Atrocious Poems A to Z By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Atrocious Poems A to Z by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Then I'd rebuild the opening of the post so a search engine immediately understands book + author + publisher + genre + relationship to your current work. Something like this:

Atrocious Poems A to Z is a poetry book by Rockford, Illinois poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg, originally published by Zombie Logic Press. Illustrated by Jenny Mathews, the collection approaches the alphabet with the dark humor, absurdity, playfulness, and occasional grotesquerie that characterized much of Vaultonburg's earlier poetry.

The book belongs to an earlier period of Vaultonburg's work, before the increasingly spare nature poetry and haiku that would lead to books including Moonscape, Small Songs for Weary Travelers, and Vanished Roads. Seen in retrospect, however, some of the same concerns are already present: overlooked objects, mortality, strange transformations, Midwestern landscapes, humor, and the collision between ordinary life and the surreal.

Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a Rockford poet and the founder of Zombie Logic Press and co-founder of Wolf Twin Books. His more recent work has increasingly centered on haiku, nature observation, walking, and an approach he describes as Prairie Zen—a Midwestern poetics grounded in close attention to the ordinary world.

His 2026 collection Vanished Roads, published by Wolf Twin Books, continues that movement toward compressed, observational poetry, bringing together 104 haiku and short poems concerned with disappearance, memory, landscape, grief, humor, and renewal.

Atrocious Poems A to Z remains part of that larger body of work: a considerably noisier and more mischievous relative of the poems that came later.

 

Titles Available By Rockford Poetry Publisher Zombie Logic Press

It was twenty-five years ago three years ago when my first book, Concave Buddha, was published by The Press of the Third Mind in Chicago. It is a press that had also published Bradley Lastname and Philip Lamantia, so I was very excited to be in that company.

The cover incorporated a piece by artist Joel Peter Whittier. 

There wasn't much talk about it locally, but they sold a lot of copies in Chicago and New York. I remember that a lot of older small press poets were a little bitter about it because it wasn't usual for a new poet to have a full-length book with a glossy cover right out of the chutes. Nowadays that doesn't mean much because of digital printing, but I didn't hold any grudges about it. The publisher simply liked my work and thought it fit in with his Dadaist style, so he published it. All these years later I now publish books and try to follow his example of being open to new writers. There's no point being a snob in an industry where there's so little at stake in the first place.

I have published three books by Rockford writers recently. The Zen of Beard Trimming by C.J. Campbell, and The Blood Dark Sea by Outlaw Poet Dennis Gulling.

The Blood Dark Sea by Dennis Gulling

I have a few other titles I hope to publish in the next couple of years. As far as I know Zombie Logic Press is the only literary press in Rockford, and has been all the twenty years I have been operating it. I'd really like to let the region and the nation know that we have a literary presence. That's the goal of the Rock River Literary Series. 

Rockford Outsider Poetry Publisher Zombie Logic Turns Twenty

Twenty years ago in October I founded Zombie Logic Press. Mainly I did so to publish my second book, Detached Retinas. I was soon to be working in the restaurant business and didn't have many intentions of publishing much more anytime soon.

And I didn't. 

But as far as I know I was the first person to use the term Zombie Logic or apply it to a going concern such as a literary press. 

Now, after twenty years of being continuously in business I edit The Rock River Literary Series, which promotes writers from Rockford, Illinois, and edit two literary journals, Zombie Logic Review and Outsider Poetry. 

Zombie Logic Press

For the last decade now I have been doing so from Downtown Rockford. When I settled in this building on the Holmes Block almost no one else was running a business Downtown anymore. A few restaurants on Block Five, but that was about it. The citizens were terrified to come Downtown. 

Eventually a coffee shop opened up. But still the historic building decayed and rotted. The roof collapsed on the Midway Theater, and the privileged white class stayed away in droves. If they ever did talk about Downtown it was in a negative way. 

I liked it here, though, back then. I remember going for walks late at night through virtually deserted streets. I liked the buildings that local vultures had been squatting on for a couple of decades as they turned to dust. I never once was accosted or even approached by anyone despite the hue and cry by smug East Siders that if you go Downtown you will get mugged. It was safe here.

Until they moved in. The very East Siders who had criticized Downtown for decades. Suddenly it didn't feel as safe anymore. But not for the reasons they said.

Because of them.