Is It Time to Start Considering Thomas L. Vaultonburg One of the Greatest Haiku Poets Ever?
By Haruki Nishimura
Seishin Institute for Literary Studies, Kyoto
The title of this essay embarrasses me, which is perhaps a useful place to begin. Anyone who has spent a life reading haiku learns to distrust greatness. Haiku itself distrusts greatness. The form has traditionally been hospitable to frogs, crows, cicadas, weeds, cold rain, worn sandals, summer grasses, old ponds. It possesses very little natural sympathy for the monumental. Even Bashō, whom we have made monumental, repeatedly directs our attention away from himself and toward something small. So when I am asked whether Thomas L. Vaultonburg should be considered one of the great haiku poets, my first response is resistance. Then I read the poems again, and the question becomes less ridiculous.
Consider first a poem of almost unreasonable economy:
fog
borrows
the bridge
Three words. There is scarcely a poem here in the conventional sense. Yet the poem performs an operation fundamental to haiku: it changes the ownership of the visible world. A bridge belongs to human beings. We design it, engineer it, name it, maintain it. It is one of our declarations of permanence. Fog possesses nothing. It has no architecture and leaves no monument. For several minutes, however, fog takes the bridge. The verb “borrows” is crucial. “Covers” would merely report weather. “Hides” would impose a little drama. “Swallows” would impose too much. “Borrows” establishes an unexpectedly gentle relationship between the permanent and impermanent. The bridge will be returned. This is very close to the deepest temporal intelligence of haiku: everything we believe we possess is merely on loan. Vaultonburg accomplishes this without announcing the thought. The philosophy exists because the image exists; remove the image and there is no philosophy.
That distinction is important because many contemporary short poems are aphorisms wearing the clothing of haiku. Vaultonburg’s strongest poems behave differently. They allow perception to generate thought. Consider another:
night pasture—
a horse shifting weight
thins the silence
Here we encounter one of Vaultonburg’s characteristic techniques. He makes an abstract condition behave as though it were physical matter. Silence can be broken. This is familiar language and therefore nearly dead language. But silence being thinned is different. Suddenly silence possesses density. The almost imperceptible movement of a horse does not destroy the night; it changes its viscosity. This is extraordinarily difficult to do well, and the poem also understands scale. Nothing “happens.” A horse does not gallop. It does not whinny. It merely shifts its weight. The poet notices the smallest possible disturbance and discovers that the entire acoustic architecture of the pasture has changed. A lesser poet would make the horse more dramatic. Vaultonburg makes the horse less dramatic, and the world consequently becomes more mysterious.
This ability appears repeatedly in his work:
marsh fog—
a heron
assembled from gray
Again, the poem depends upon a verb. The heron does not emerge from the fog. It is “assembled” from it. We watch matter organize itself into life. The poem therefore occupies a strange border between observation and creation myth. Anyone who has watched a great blue heron become visible through marsh fog recognizes the accuracy of the perception. Yet the poem also suggests, very quietly, that perhaps this is how a heron actually comes into existence: the morning collects sufficient grayness and constructs a bird. This is one of Vaultonburg’s most distinctive gifts. His surrealism frequently arrives through literal observation. The world becomes strange because he has looked at it long enough.
There is another excellent example:
blackwater creek—
a turtle sinks
until air forgets it
What does it mean for air to forget a turtle? Logically, nothing. Poetically, almost everything. The turtle passes from one medium into another. At first it remains conceptually attached to the surface. Then it descends farther. Eventually the world above closes. “Air forgets it” transforms disappearance into a relationship between elements. Air and water momentarily become two territories of consciousness. Notice also the patience of the poem. The important word may actually be “until.” We are required to remain beside the creek and watch the turtle continue downward. The poem takes perhaps three seconds to read and considerably longer to finish happening. That is one measure of successful haiku: the best examples possess an unusual ratio between textual size and experiential duration. A few words may continue unfolding in consciousness for minutes, years, sometimes decades.
Vaultonburg’s strongest poems also demonstrate another characteristic worth examining: the final line does not explain the first two lines but destabilizes them.
mud puddle—
the crow leaves behind
less sky
The first line gives us something almost contemptibly small: a mud puddle. The final line gives us the sky. Between them stands a crow. The optical event is simple. Sky is reflected in water, and the movement of the crow changes what is visible. But Vaultonburg converts this tiny phenomenon into a problem of subtraction. Can a crow remove sky? For the duration of the poem, yes. This movement between the immense and insignificant is deeply congenial to haiku. A puddle contains the heavens; a bird alters them. Vaultonburg returns to this vertical relationship elsewhere:
noon sun—
the stars
somewhere inside blue
The stars have not disappeared merely because daylight prevents us from seeing them. Everyone knows this. Almost nobody experiences the knowledge. The haiku restores the experience. That distinction—between knowing something and suddenly perceiving what one already knows—is central to the form. Haiku at its best does not necessarily provide information. It produces recognition.
One feels this even more strongly in another poem:
power outage
the stars resume
their old jobs
This poem could easily have become sentimental. Instead, its humor saves it. The stars have apparently been unemployed by electricity; when human illumination fails, they return to work. The joke contains an ecological criticism, but the poem wisely refuses to state it. The hierarchy between human civilization and the natural world is reversed through eight ordinary words. Vaultonburg’s humor deserves greater attention because it protects his poetry from solemnity, and the most obvious example may be:
the undertaker
waves from his bicycle—
mulberry season
I admire this poem enormously. The undertaker carries the unavoidable association of death. The bicycle introduces almost comic lightness. Mulberry season introduces abundance, sweetness and summer. Death rides through ripeness and waves. Nothing is resolved, and that refusal to resolve the contradiction is precisely what gives the poem life. The undertaker is not transformed into a symbol; he remains an undertaker riding a bicycle. Mulberries remain mulberries. Yet the juxtaposition generates something larger than either fact.
This is classical haiku machinery operating in a distinctly American landscape, and the distinction matters. Vaultonburg does not attempt to write Japanese haiku in English. He does something more difficult: he accepts the perceptual discipline of haiku while allowing his actual world to enter the form. Quarries appear. Underpasses appear. Estate auctions appear. Canadian wildfire smoke enters an American city. Abandoned infrastructure exists beside birds and weather.
underpass puddle—
the city skyline
shaken by sparrows
This could not have been written by Bashō, nor should it have been. Its world is infrastructural, urban, damaged and ordinary. Yet its mechanism would be immediately recognizable to an older haiku consciousness: large and small encounter one another, permanence is exposed as temporary, and the human world is altered by creatures that do not acknowledge its importance. The skyline appears monumental until sparrows shake it. There is something almost democratic about Vaultonburg’s imagination. Nothing remains safely above anything else.
A similar transformation occurs in one of his most ambitious poems:
old mineshaft—
a wheel of bats
rebuilds the darkness
The verb “rebuilds” is audacious. Darkness is normally understood as absence, and one does not build absence. But the circling bats appear to manufacture darkness through motion. The abandoned mine—the remnant of human extraction—has been repossessed by animal life. Yet “rebuilds” complicates the easy ecological reading. The bats are not merely inhabitants. They have become laborers of darkness. A human industrial site has acquired a new industry. The poem contains history without discussing history.
That ability becomes even clearer in:
estate auction—
the quilts
open to another winter
Here the human story is almost entirely missing, and because it is missing we feel it more strongly. Whose quilts? Whose house? Why are they being auctioned? Death, debt, relocation, the dissolution of a family? Vaultonburg refuses to tell us. Instead the quilts open. “Another winter” may belong to another household, another generation, another life. The physical object continues after the circumstances that gathered it into one particular home have disappeared. This is an exceptionally mature haiku because its emotion resides largely in what the poet declines to say.
There are places where Vaultonburg approaches lyricism more directly:
early lilacs—
grief caught
without its coat
Here the personification is unmistakable. Grief has become a figure surprised by spring. Normally I would distrust such a maneuver in haiku because it risks converting the observed world into a vehicle for the poet’s feelings. But “without its coat” rescues the poem. The phrase is slightly comic, slightly domestic and physically imaginable. Grief has dressed for winter and suddenly discovers lilacs. The season has changed before sorrow was prepared for it. This is not the claim that spring cures grief. Something more convincing happens: grief finds itself temporarily overdressed.
Vaultonburg is particularly effective when his poems hover at precisely this boundary between sincerity and play. “berry thicket— / my hands / stained with wanting” begins with the literal stain of fruit and becomes desire without ceasing to be berry juice. In “ripe figs— / my mouth learns / another prayer,” taste becomes devotion without the poem ever specifying a deity. And in “deer at dusk— / her stillness / rearranges mine,” the animal does not become an emblem for some preexisting human idea. Instead, attention to the animal changes the observer’s physical state.
This last point may be the key to understanding Vaultonburg. His best haiku are not descriptions of nature so much as records of recalibration. Something enters perception—a horse, heron, turtle, crow, spider, deer—and the human observer’s relationship to the world changes by several degrees. Sometimes the transformation is almost microscopic:
fog drift—
a spider tests the air
with one leg
There is almost no metaphor here, and none is necessary. The spider becomes nearly scientific in its delicacy. “Tests” is exactly the right verb because the extended leg appears simultaneously tentative and knowledgeable. The creature knows something about the air that the human observer does not. The hierarchy of perception reverses again: the poet watches the spider, but the spider reads the world. This humility before nonhuman intelligence connects Vaultonburg to an important current running through the history of haiku. Nature is not scenery surrounding the human subject. Human consciousness is only one local event occurring among many others.
This is why one of his simplest poems may ultimately be among his most revealing:
empty basket—
carrying home
the birdsong
Nothing has been gathered, and everything has been gathered. The basket is empty according to one economy and full according to another. It would be easy to dismiss this as charming, but one should resist doing so. The poem quietly asks what constitutes possession, harvest and value, and more importantly, it answers without argument. The person simply walks home.
There is also a regional dimension to Vaultonburg’s work that I suspect will become increasingly important. Haiku has always depended upon particularity of place. Yet American practitioners sometimes inherit the vocabulary of Japanese haiku without sufficiently transforming it, resulting in an imported landscape of moons, ponds, blossoms and temple bells. Vaultonburg’s landscape feels inhabited rather than inherited. Prairie, quarry, underpass, mulberry, pawpaw, smoke, mine, bicycle and estate auction coexist naturally with herons, spiders and plum blossoms because they belong to the same perceptual world.
Perhaps the most beautiful expression of this regional sensibility is:
across the prairie—
rain arriving
on horseback
The image risks extravagance, yet anyone who has stood beneath a Midwestern sky and watched a storm advance across open land understands its physical accuracy. Rain possesses distance, speed and a visible front. “On horseback” activates the historical imagination of the prairie without turning the poem into historical reenactment. Weather becomes rider; landscape becomes duration. The same rootedness appears more quietly in:
pawpaw season—
the road home
sweet on our hands
This poem has almost nothing to prove, which may be why I trust it. The sweetness is literal before it becomes emotional. Fruit remains on the hands. The road becomes associated with the taste. Home is therefore not defined geographically but sensually. The poem understands memory before memory has happened.
I have deliberately avoided one question until now: What would it actually mean to call someone “one of the greatest haiku poets ever”? There can be no objective measurement. Bashō transformed the form. Buson brought extraordinary visual precision. Issa expanded its emotional and creaturely universe. Shiki altered its modern conception. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced many extraordinary Japanese and international practitioners working under radically different linguistic conditions. To place an American poet casually among such figures would be unserious.
But there is another way to understand the question. Greatness in poetry is sometimes recognized not through historical rank but through the accumulation of individual poems that become difficult to imagine having been written any other way. That is the test I would apply to Vaultonburg. Could another poet have written “fog / borrows / the bridge”? Perhaps. But after reading it, “borrows” begins to feel inevitable. Could another poet have written of a heron “assembled from gray”? Perhaps. But afterward it becomes difficult to watch a heron emerge from fog without remembering the phrase. Could another poet have discovered that a horse shifting its weight “thins the silence”? Perhaps. But the language alters the experience it describes. And could another poet have watched a turtle descend until “air forgets it”? Perhaps. But once the poem exists, the world contains a possibility it did not quite contain before.
This is the severe test. A successful haiku records perception. A very good haiku changes perception. A great haiku permanently contaminates perception: after encountering it, one can no longer see the original phenomenon innocently. Fog may borrow things. Herons may assemble themselves. Silence may possess thickness. Sparrows may shake cities. Bats may manufacture darkness. A crow may leave behind less sky. This is not merely a collection of attractive metaphors. Across the poems, we encounter a coherent imaginative system. The supposedly solid becomes temporary. The supposedly empty becomes substantial. Human structures become fragile. Animals become agents. Weather becomes animate. The enormous enters the tiny. The dead remain beside the living without requiring explanation.
Most importantly, the poet himself repeatedly diminishes. The greatest danger in asking whether someone is a great poet is that the poet becomes larger than the poems, while haiku demands almost precisely the opposite. The poet should become smaller. In Vaultonburg’s strongest work he does. He becomes the person standing beside the puddle, watching the horse, carrying the basket, noticing the spider, tasting the fruit. The world does the rest.
So, is it time to begin considering Thomas L. Vaultonburg one of the greatest haiku poets? I would phrase the conclusion more carefully. It is time to take the possibility seriously. Not because he has written hundreds or thousands of haiku; quantity proves nothing. Not because he is American, contemporary, prolific or unusual. None of these establishes artistic importance. It is because within this body of work there are already individual poems possessing the compression, perceptual originality, linguistic inevitability and afterlife that we associate with lasting haiku. Others demonstrate the same power through radical brevity, humor, ecological perception and the transformation of ordinary American places into sites of revelation.
There is finally one poem I keep returning to:
pond surface—
a fish rises
through two worlds
The fish knows nothing of our argument. It rises through the surface and for an instant occupies two elements before the water closes again. Perhaps this is what the finest haiku have always done. They discover the almost invisible boundary between worlds and permit us, very briefly, to see something passing through it. Thomas L. Vaultonburg has learned how to stand beside that boundary and, more importantly, has learned when not to speak. In haiku, this may be where greatness begins.
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