The Prairie Zen School of Haiku of Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 The Prairie Zen School of Haiku

People often imagine Zen arriving from somewhere else. A mountain monastery. A bamboo grove. A stone garden where every pebble has been raked into perfect order. We inherit those images so completely that we forget the practice itself has never belonged to a landscape. It belongs to attention.

For more than thirty years I have been writing from a different landscape.

Not because I set out to invent anything new, but because I never had another place to stand.

My teachers have been red-winged blackbirds balancing on roadside cattails. Wind passing through abandoned farm fields. Hall Creek after spring rain. Snow drifting across forgotten county roads. Oaks that have watched generations of people arrive believing they were important and leave proving otherwise.

The prairie has always been enough.

Long before I ever thought of using the words Prairie Zen, the work had already begun. My earliest poems searched for moments that escaped notice. Later, my haiku abandoned explanation almost entirely. Instead of telling readers what to think, I learned to trust what remained after language became quiet.

A dead leaf blowing into my mouth while trying to speak the truth.

An old dog faithfully guarding nothing.

A bare tree still capable of holding the sky.

These are not symbols to decode. They are complete experiences. The prairie has no interest in becoming metaphor simply because a writer arrived carrying one.

That understanding did not come from philosophy alone. It came from years of walking. Through Rockford parks and railroad margins. Along river trails. Through restored prairie and oak savanna. Through Severson Dells, where glaciers, dolomite, Hall Creek, birds, fungi, prairie grass and deep geological time quietly refuse to separate themselves into subjects. They exist together because the world exists together.

The prairie teaches scale.

Stand in tall grass and you discover you are neither insignificant nor central. You are simply present.

That may be the most difficult lesson modern life offers.

Our culture rewards performance. The prairie rewards observation. Our devices demand reaction. The prairie asks only that you notice. Every season strips away another unnecessary layer until attention itself becomes enough.

I have watched this happen in my own work. Books like Small Songs for Weary Travelers and Vanished Roads were never attempts to imitate Japanese aesthetics. They were attempts to discover what contemplation sounds like when spoken with a Midwestern accent. They belong to gravel roads instead of temple paths, grain elevators instead of pagodas, meadowlarks instead of cranes.

That does not make them less Zen.

It makes them honestly rooted.

Prairie Zen is not a school. It has no robes, no membership, no doctrine waiting to be defended. It is simply the realization that awakening is no less available beside a rusted fencepost than beneath a cherry tree.

The prairie does not ask us to become someone else before it reveals itself.

It only asks us to look.

For decades, that has been the work.

Everything else has merely been writing it down.

Illustration from Vanished Roads by Tré

See the Prairie Zen of Thomas L. Vaultonburg in his latest book of haiku Vanished Roads

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Vanished Roads Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 In late 2019, my life became much smaller.

A ten-year relationship ended. I lost a home, daily contact with children I loved, longtime friendships, and a place within an arts community that had shaped much of my adult life. The future I had imagined for myself suddenly no longer existed. Before I could begin rebuilding, the world itself contracted. The COVID-19 pandemic closed doors for everyone, including many of the paths I might have taken to reconnect with the people, places, and opportunities I felt I had lost.

Then, in 2020, I suffered a stroke.

Looking back, it seems almost inevitable that I would find my way to haiku.

At a time when everything around me appeared to be shrinking, I was drawn to a literary form built on economy, attention, and presence. I began studying Buddhism and, more specifically, Soto Zen. What started as curiosity gradually became practice. I found myself less interested in explaining the world and more interested in experiencing it directly. Haiku offered a way to do that.

My earliest attempts were often little more than narrative poems wearing haiku clothing. I brought with me the habits I had developed over decades of writing lyric and narrative poetry. I wanted to tell stories, explain emotions, and make sure readers understood what I meant. Over time, however, the poems began teaching me something different. Instead of using haiku to express myself, I became interested in disappearing into the moment itself.

The result was not merely a change in writing style. It was a change in how I moved through the world.

Vanished Roads chronicles that journey.

The collection begins in grief and disorientation. It acknowledges loss—the loss of loved ones, relationships, identities, expectations, and familiar ways of living. Yet it is not a book about remaining lost. It is a book about what happens when the old maps stop working.

During this period, I reconnected with one of my oldest friends, Tré. Together we began a creative partnership that opened new possibilities in both art and life. In many ways, her presence marks the turning point of the collection. A door opens. A path appears where none seemed possible before.

As the book progresses, the poems become less concerned with the self and more concerned with the world beyond it. Roads disappear. Rivers, mountains, forests, weather, and animals take their place as teachers. The journey becomes less about recovering what was lost and more about learning how to walk forward without needing to recover it.

The title poem contains the image that best captures the spirit of the collection: a traveler asks for directions and is handed a map of vanished roads. That is the predicament many of us eventually face. The paths that once defined us disappear. The question then becomes whether we can continue the journey anyway.

These haiku are my attempt to answer yes.

Vanished Roads June 21st From Wolf Twin Books

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The Fourteenth Way of Looking at a Blackbird

In 2011 several thousand blackbirds mysteriously fell from the sky in Arkansas. Prompting a storm of conspiracy theories concerning everything from weather modification to tests of electromagnetic pulse weapons. My suspicions of something nefarious being afoot were allayed soon after by hearing several credible ornithologists state that it's not a particularly uncommon phenomenon. It happens several times every year all over the globe. 


Last week the Baltimore Ravens beat the Houston Texans to advance to the AFC Championship game. One more win and they will advance to the Super Bowl. The team is named for the creation of a poet, but I doubt many of the hardcore football fans know that. Still, something about that tickles my sensibilities.

There is no real difference between a crow, a raven, and a blackbird. Only size. 

Earlier this week a mysterious figure who showed up every year at Poe's grave to make a toast to the writer failed to show up for the third straight year. 

I wrote this Haiku when I heard the news story about the blackbirds of Arkansas. The font is, of course, a Gothic font called Uberholme. And as all readers of poetry know, the inspiration for the poem is Wallace Steven's poem Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird. Here's what I did with a Tiny Drawing I remember Jenny had drawn earlier in the year...

And here is what a master of poetry did with the subject

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens

I 

Among twenty snowy mountains, 

The only moving thing 

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II 

I was of three minds, 

Like a tree 

In which there are three blackbirds.

III 

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. 

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV 

A man and a woman 

Are one. 

A man and a woman and a blackbird 

Are one.

V 

I do not know which to prefer, 

The beauty of inflections 

Or the beauty of innuendoes, 

The blackbird whistling 

Or just after.

VI 

Icicles filled the long window 

With barbaric glass. 

The shadow of the blackbird 

Crossed it, to and fro. 

The mood 

Traced in the shadow 

An indecipherable cause.

VII 

O thin men of Haddam, 

Why do you imagine golden birds? 

Do you not see how the blackbird 

Walks around the feet 

Of the women about you?

VIII 

I know noble accents 

And lucid, inescapable rhythms; 

But I know, too, 

That the blackbird is involved 

In what I know.

IX 

When the blackbird flew out of sight, 

It marked the edge 

Of one of many circles.

X 

At the sight of blackbirds 

Flying in a green light, 

Even the bawds of euphony 

Would cry out sharply.

XI 

He rode over Connecticut 

In a glass coach. 

Once, a fear pierced him, 

In that he mistook 

The shadow of his equipage 

For blackbirds.

XII 

The river is moving. 

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII 

It was evening all afternoon. 

It was snowing 

And it was going to snow. 

The blackbird sat 

In the cedar-limbs.    

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