Literary blog of the American haiku poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg who has been published in over 200 international literary journals, including Exquisite Corpse, Modern Haiku, and Presence.
Six years ago photographer Ryan Davis and poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg began a weekly urban hike always beginning in the exact same place in the virtual geographical center of Rockford and radiating out in a different direction each time.
What happens when a poet and a photographer take the same steps on the same streets in the same town so many times that all of the places and things that seemed so familiar in the beginning became new and mysterious... and magical.
From iconic Rockford landmarks like the Faust, Midway, and Times Theatre, to long-forgotten ghost murals and infinite susprises discovered in places rarely accessed except on foot, Davis and Vaultonburg documented in photographs and haiku a version of Rockford few ever experience.
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay greatness." -Oscar Wilde
Rockford, Illinois, was recently named the most dangerous city in America with a population under 200,000 by F.B.I. statistics, overtaking Little Rock Arkansas. In the geographic center of this city's most dangerous neighborhood sits what NPR has called "America's most dangerous small press," Zombie Logic Press. That press is celebrating it's 20th year in continuous operation on October 31st. Founded in 1996 by publisher Thomas L. Vaultonburg. Zombie Logic Press was created initially to self-publish the poetry of Thomas L. Vaultonburg, but eventually branched out to include the periodical Zombie Logic Review, which publishes Outsider, Outlaw, Surrealist and Dad poetry, and lately the works of Rockford writers in its Rock River Literary Series. So far books have been published by Jesus Correa, C.J. Campbell, and Dennis Gulling. When Vaultonburg decided to locate in Downtown Rockford, very few businesses were willing to open up space on the area, and most of the citizens were terrified to go there. Many historic building were left to rot as property speculators were content to just watch them collapse until the government gave them money to gentrify them. But not Vaultonburg. The poet responsible for books such as Flesh Wounds, Concave Buddha, Submerged Structure, and Detached Retinas, felt right at home in the Downtown area. After years of publishing internationally noted poets at Zombie Logic Review, Vaultonburg joined forces with Olivia Suchs to create a seconds online literary journal, Outsider Poetry, which gives voice to the self-trained, mentally ill, and marganilized creators odf the world.
Concave Buddha by Thomas L. Vaultonburg
Being in the vanguard of resurgances is nothing new for the maverick publisher, who enlisted in the Marine Corps at age 17, received his B.S. in Psychology from Rockford College. Even though most of the businesses he sees around him are coming and going faster than the time it takes to learn their name, Vaultonburg says Zombie Logic Press is here to stay, and plans to publish 2 books by Rockford writers every year. Pin It
A few words as I get ready to eat my TGIFridays chicken wings. Apparently a very few words, because I never went back to finish that blog yesterday, and I have no idea what my original thought was. Derrick Rose was traded from the Bulls, the Democrats had a sit-in in Congress, and a storm of the century failed to show up here in Rockford. Aside from that I think I was probably just going to talk about The Rock River Literary Series. Book number four in the Rock River Literary Series seems to be set, and book five is also in the pipeline.Both will depart from the beaten path in substantial and interesting ways. The book release party for book three, The Blood Dark Sea by outlaw poet Dennis Gulling, was a wild success. Guest bartender Tim Stotz concocted a specialty cocktail, The Blood Dark Sea, and I stood in for the author of our first book, Jesus Correa, who had to wash dishes that night.
Outsider poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg impersonates the best dishwasher in the world, Jesus Correa at the book release party for Dennis Gulling's The Blood Dark Sea at JR Kortman Gallery in Rockford, Illinois
I see that The Blood Dark Sea is going to be reviewed in Cultural Weekly and some other places, but not much talk locally. Everyone who has read it thinks it is the best book of Outlaw Poetry written in America in over a decade. Having read it as many times as anyone but the author, I agree. Sitting on the couch yesterday waiting for the storm that never came I just realized it was time to move on to the next book. I still will be doing all I can to promote the last three, but it's time for the next one.
The author contacted me when Jenny and I were in New Orleans. And after a vacation, and a vacation needed to recover from that vacation, it's time to start working. Time to promote Rockford poetry.
There's this very small building tucked in between two larger buildings on 7th Street here in Rockford, Illinois. For decades now 7th Street has been the street in our city known for prostitution and drug dealing. If you wanted to misbehave, you went to 7th Street. It is also remembered by older Rockfordians as a grand corridor of factories and furniture makers emblematic of their Swedish heritage and Rockford's glory days. The sound you hear me making is simulated masturbation, because those days are forty years behind us. Those grand building have been sitting and decaying for twenty-five years. A few developers own most of them, and allow them to sit and rot until they can find a way to get the public to pay them to create condos or a retail space that will soon become irrelevant because no one wants to go to Midtown because even if things are changing for the better all they remember is what they've seen on the police blotter all their lives. All of that back history related so I can say this...
This is the Untied Artists Building at 205 7th Street in Rockford, Illinois, America's 3rd most miserable, uneducated, fattest, and dangerous city. For about a decade I have been walking
by it and dreaming I'd buy it and have a creative bureau where all my
favorite creators just punched in whenever they damn well felt like
it and worked on whatever they wanted. Obviously that will never
happen, but I can say in that past decade all of those people have
done amazing work and I think they are all awesome. Oh, J painted
this. I now own the Untied Artists Building, sort of.
I normally dislike small spaces and buildings, but for some reason this tiny place just captures my imagination. Last night J and I peaked in as we were on our way to Phoenix Traders to deliver copies of the latest Zombie Logic Press book The Blood Dark Sea by Dennis Gulling for his shelves. There wasn't much to see. I don't ever remember anyone being in there, or it having been open for any purpose, but of course one of the local vulture slum lords owns it and has no intention of keeping it up like a decent human being or offering it for sale so someone else can. To let the once majestic structures of a city like Rockford sit and crumble must be some sort of cosmic crime. Of course it's not the type of crime we prosecute in America. In fact, we celebrate vultures who prosper this way, because they succeed, if you call allowing neighborhoods to crumble for years, even decades so you can profiteer from them later being a successful human being.
I don't. But then again, I make things, and tend to evaluate people by what they create, teach others, and contribute to the general pool of ideas and objects that move us ever forward instead of backwards. Rockford is just one of those places that loves the past. And longs to return to a past that will never, ever exist again. The way forward is creativity, ingenuity, and accepting the fact that the world has moved on ,and as a city we need to move on with it.
What I'm pining for here was never more than a small pipe dream of mine. The adult in me knew I was never going to own a building where all my friends showed up and made whatever they wanted and people were going to give us money and everything would be a happy ending. But in that past decade those friends have been incredibly productive here in Rockford. Painters, photographers, musicians, poets, videographers, web developers, dancers, spoken word artists... so it turns out The Untied Artists Bureau is just a metaphor for the life I live already, and am so proud of and grateful for. And neighborhoods like Midtown and Downtown are now coming back. Soon we won't even be able to afford to live in the places we helped survive the darkest days of decay and paying for the sins of the past.
But that's ok, because we'll be somewhere else creating and dreaming and breathing life into places others left for dead.
I just learned one of the benefits of paying nearly $100 a month for slow internet service from Xfinity is I can watch the entire run of The Rockford Files on my laptop at my leisure, instead of waiting until midnight every night to watch them on MeTV. Also, I can watch them in sequence, which is what I am currently doing at 2 a.m. It's one of the things I'm doing. Another is promoting my increasingly elaborate hoax of a National Outsider Poetry Slam League of America. The hardest part is the dang acronym. I've called it about twenty-seven different things already. Tom Atkins! Tom Atkins is on Rockford Files. Here's the expanded logo I made with the names of all the teams.
Outsider Poetry Slam League of America
I also made a great seven second video for the OPSLA
It gets a little redundant, but there's a comfort in redundancy sometimes. Six episodes of Rockford Files watched tonight. I'm concerned I'm wearing out my leather chase lounge. Went to the YMCA for the first time in a year last night. We ran around the track a few times with Jack. Then he led us in some calisthenics. I have a can of bean and bacon soup in the cupboard. Sometimes when I get here to Zombie Logic Press headquarters I find I'm out of everything.
I have plenty of things I could be taking seriously right now, including final revisions on The Blood Dark Sea. We have a smashing cover, designed by much sought after graphic artist and illustrator Jenny M Mathews, and a great manuscript of poems, so maybe all that's really left for me to do is watch this episode of The Rockford Files with Susan Strasburg, and maybe one more, perhaps look out the window and see if that moon is there.
Aside from finishing this book, and promoting the OPSLA, some of my other short and intermediate goals are going to the YMCA more and acquiring nice near mint examples of the 1969 Hot Wheels Beach Bomb in copper, and an Alive 55 in lemon yellow.
Check out this slam poetry team from Podunk, Vermont. Yes, there is a Podunk. The Podunk Polemicists
About five years ago the publisher of The Rock River Times summoned me to a local bar to discuss a matter very close to his heart: poetry. I've know the owner of the region's only independent newspaper twenty-five years now, since he started the Rock River Times, which was then called The North End Times. Two of the things he cares about most are The Rock River Trail and poetry. We ran up quite a tab that night talking about all kinds of things and poetry, too. It turned out he was really interested in starting a poetry portal as an adjunct of his newspaper's website, and wanted to tie the whole thing in to writers and poets along the Rock River. It was a project with a wide sweep, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I agreed to come in an talk to him about it when we were both a little more grounded. So, I did. And I brought a friend of mine who is a master of all things web related. We hammered out a plan to create the website and bought a domain name for the literary press we were going to publish the books under, and I was commissioned to populate the website with content, beginning with a history of Rockford poetry. As many proposed projects do, especially the more ambitious ones, this one, although noble, never quite got off the ground. But it was a damn good idea. Which is why I decided to do it myself. I wrote the recent history of Rockford poetry, interviewing a few dozen people who were there, and asking them to remember the who, what, where, when, and why of Rockford poetry over the past twenty-five years or so. When I did those interviews it occurred to me I run a literary press. True, for the entire history of Zombie Logic Press I had only only published my own books, but why couldn't I fill in that gap and publish books by Rockford writers. So, I did. Starting with the book I wanted to do the most, Iced Cream by Jesus Correa. Then another book by a local writer. But there was one book I knew I had to do. A book by a poet who has been in the area for a long time, and who was mentioned by more than person I had interviewed as the best local poet in Rockford, Dennis Gulling. I had read a few times with Dennis Gulling in the early 90's when there was a strong resurgence in the poetry scene in Rockford due to David Enzminger, editor of The Mas Tequila Review, Richard Vargas, founder of the Outlaw Poetry movement Todd Moore, and myself. I think Dr. Susan Porterfield was in that mix, a serious academic poet and professor at Rockford University. For about twenty I have to honestly say not much has happened in the Rockford poetry scene, This will be the third book in the Rock River Poetry Series I am doing. I have a few other local writers in mind for the next few books. Most of them keep losing town, as is customary in Rockford, but it is still a fact that they did live here at one time, and will always be a part of that history. The book I am publishing by Dennis Gulling is titled The Blood Dark Sea. It is a book of Outlaw Poetry, and Mr. Gulling is a protege of Todd Moore, and his Outlaw poetry credentials are impeccable. More than that, the poetry is magnificent. Each piece is like a 30's noir movie. I finished most of the editing this week and signed a quote from the printer in Minnesota. It is possible the book will be available in Mid March. I'd like to be better at promoting the books I make, but it's really hard and soul-crushing work trying to sell anything, especially poetry. Nonetheless, I feel really good about these books in and of themselves, and I hope to get a chance to do a lot more whether I ever break even or not.
For all actions there is an equal and opposite reaction. One of the laws of physics. Maybe. I'm not a physicist, but I'm certain I've heard that somewhere before. The poet John Keats had a similar concept for dealing with the negative. He called it negative capability, and the general gist of that is creation involves what you do with the empty, negative spaces the Universe offers you. You can see them as empty, dark places, or as opportunities to create something where nothing existed before. To do this one needs to ignore the boundaries and boxes we too often feel we're confined by. Blow up the paradigm. It's almost never in this life you're given a perfectly operating widget factory with no defects and all you're asked to do is sit in your office and press a button when you want coffee. No. No one ever hands you the keys to the New York Yankees and a blank check and says "just win." If you want to succeed at anything more than likely you'll do it from humble beginnings, without much help from anyone else, and often you'll encounter criticism and challenges from those who say either it can't be done, or it shouldn't be done. That said, this blog is about Rockford, Illinois, and the Misery Loves Company of The Rockford Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. No, actually this blog is about me. Someone I knew once gave me a St. Jude medallion because with the amount of hopeless and forsaken causes I champion they thought I needed all the help I could get. One time at Castaways, the bar my brother and I owned, we were literally working under three inches of water because of flooding, and I lost that medallion. A few weeks later it flooded again, and St. Jude popped up from the abyss I thought it had disappeared into.
What's the point? None, really, I just detect an resemblance between the advertising campaign I designed for Castaways, a bar that had been largely forsaken and left for dead under a bridge, and the RACVB's campaign Misery Loves Company. Here's one of the radio spots I wrote. When I wrote that spot I had been given what seemed like an impossible task. To get people to come to a dive bar under a bridge with a tradition of being seedy, unpleasant, and crowded with unfriendly drunks. Did my campaign work? Well, no, because it was impossible, but I can say 7 years later that location has been revitalized and made relevant again. I was charged with reversing a negative image and making it into a positive. It's not easy to change public perception. Especially a deeply ingrained, negative public perception. I can understand what the RACVB was thinking when they devised the Misery Loves Company Campaign, but I don't think it works. Because words have meanings. And your audience tends to tune you out these days before you get to your punchline. If I say "Bill Clinton is a terrible womanizer and the best President we've had in recent history," what most people will remember is that I just admitted, or asserted, that Bill Clinton is a womanizer. Everyone who already believes that is going to use that to re-affirm what they already believed, and almost everyone else is going to be checking their Twitter before you finish with your message. Another reason I find the campaign to be a mistake is that the RACVB is trying to assume the role of the underdog, or the put upon little guy fighting the big machine, but these are the people who comprise the machine. At least the local machine. They don't understand the true struggle of people who are oppressed, forsaken, or marginalized by the prevailing system. they ARE the ones who messed it up in the first place, now they want to make a joke as if they're clever. And it rings as dull as a bell of lead. A better tack, in my opinion, would be to accept their large role in creating the very conditions they now want to lampoon, apologize, then promise to do better. Sure, humor can be part of that, but if my surgeon cuts off the wrong leg the last thing I want to hear from him/her is a joke. If you want to do comedy, hit one of the open mic comedy nights here in Rockford. It's an added insult to an injury for which you were largely responsible. This community needs Sully Sullenberger, not the Italian Cruise ship captain who needed to be ordered back on the boat by authorities. I understand the idea behind this campaign. Hell, it's almost identical to the one I tried to use to turn around a business with a long history of mismanagement, but in my campaign I wasn't saying my business sucked, I was saying it didn't suck. I didn't allow the listeners first contact with my product to be an admission of failure. After an admission like that your punchline is irrelevant. You already told us what you thought about your own city. Words have meanings. Here's another example from Rockford, Illinois.
Now this is just an unfortunate and careless thing to let people you're trying to convert see. True, I'm hypersensitive to the juxtaposition of language and images, being a poet, and I did see this banner about a million more times than your average Rockford citizen, but until you stop doing things like this you're going to be mocked.
An old cliche says that all publicity is good publicity, even when it's bad, but mockery is never good. be defiant, yes, and people might take up for you because you're fighting back in the face of hopeless odds, but be a smartass when you're trying to evade responsibility and people will skewer you. And that's how this campaign feels to me and a lot of the creative types I know who actually work in this city trying to create and just doing our best to get by.
Maybe your campaign will be successful. I'd have preferred to see something like what the American auto industry had to do when they fessed up to making crappy cars and getting outworked and outdesigned by the Japanese for a long time, but the difference makers in this town don't seem interested in shouldering the blame for anything. The ship went down. You were at the helm. Apologize and start looking outside the myopic cadre of cohorts who seem to be exercising too much influence and using too little judgement to be trusted in the future.
Scrap this ill-conceived campaign, apologize, accept responsibility, then have a real meeting with the creative types of Rockford. The types of people out there populating the art scene, the music scene, opening stores and restaurants, small businesses of every type. You've ignored them for too long, and your tone deafness has led to this heaping on of criticism from the national media. The national media has no bone to pick with Rockford. They couldn't care any less. They're just reporting facts. And John Keats would advise you to use that assessment as a motivation to change the paradigm, flip the script, and make Shinola out of this mountain of shit.
2026 Update: what I could never say about this blog is my friend Andrew made a website shortly after this documenting all the real misery going on in Rockford, from the homelessness to the urban blight, and the weasel cocksucker who designed this moronic campaign came to his job at a news station and leaned on his bosses to either make him take the website down or fire him. He took the website down. But it was a weasel cocksucker move and par for the course for the corrupt Chamber of Commerce types we have here who still ignore all forms of real misery but their own while stuffing their pockets from the public coffer.
Greetings from Rockford, Illinois. I found these postcards of the Faust Hotel on Ebay today while I was looking for some neat historical memorabilia. I can see this hotel from my North window. From the same window I can also see The Midway Theater.
Presidents and the rich and famous stayed here at the Faust. Kennedy was in there. Sinatra. I've never been in there but in the uppermost room a few nights ago I saw a light I hadn't seen turned on in four years and I imagined a super-secret meeting of some ancient society sworn to protect the city had been convened. I just couldn't think of anyone in this city who would be summoned to such a meeting.
This is the lobby of the Faust. It looks pretty much this way when I walk by it almost every day. Knowing Rockford that's probably the same carpet. I'll look hard next time and report back on that.
And this is one of the lounges. I hear there's also a bowling alley in there. I wonder if JFK bowled when he was there. It seems unlikely given the many quality entertainment options open to him, but it could have happened. Right here in...
This is where I live. The Holmes Block in Rockford, Illinois, home of Zombie Logic Press, one of the Midwest's oldest independent literary presses, in continuous operation since 1997. The building was constructed in 1886. Most of the buildings in scenic downtown Rockford have a similar facade that states when the building was constructed and the name of the block. Interestingly, by block they meant the building itself, not an entire city block, as several building on one block will have the same annotation as "block." Most were built between 1880 and 1910. There are eternal rumors of impending gentrification and young professionals willing to commute from Rockford to Chicago to avoid oppressive taxes who want to buy loft space and condos Downtown and money is no object. But until that happens and I have to pack up the Zombie Logic press and class up somewhere else I'll continue to enjoy one of the best views in the entire Midwest overlooking State and 3rd Street.
The Holmes Block in Downtown Rockford, Illinois, home of Zombie Logic Press. Illustration by Jenny Mathews.
You know you're in some deep shit when the people of the Quad Cities start making fun of you. I've been to the Quad Cities. It's sort of like being made fun of by the chess team in high school. Only a few months after Forbes Magazine named my hometown, Rockford, Illinois, one of America's most dangerous cities in America, a Gallup poll named the city America's fourth fattest, which brought to mind Dean Wormer's infamous words to the members of the Animal House fraternity: "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son," but fat, drunk, stupid AND violent does seem to be the Rockford way. In 1996 Money Magazine rated Rockford the 300th and worst city in America, an honor which elicited exactly the response you'd expect from people who are fat, stupid, and violent... they started a big fire and burned Money Magazine. Which is, I suppose as good a show of civic pride as one's likely to see around here, but what might be a better response to being called out for being woefully inadequate is to try and get better. But that shit ain't going to fly around these parts. The outrage over Money Magazine's appraisal of our worth soon dissipated, but what didn't go away was the blight, ignorance, and resignation to failure that caused the ranking in the first place. I was born in Swedish American hospital 43 years ago. I currently live two blocks from Swedish American Hospital, where I was born 43 years ago. Is there something wrong with me? Maybe. But maybe I just like an underdog. Maybe I like a lost cause. Call me nuts, but maybe I like Rockford. I live on a block with five restaurants, any one of which you could go in and get a really good meal any day of the week. I create poetry and art in a community with other artists I have great respect for. Every day I walk amongst great architecture and pass by shops where people with a deep commitment to this community are trying their best to bring the Downtown area back from the dead. What's more, you get a mile outside of Rockford and you're in the place that feeds the world. It's beautiful. So, what's the problem? Well, last week I heard sirens and I look out my window, not because there are sirens because that happens hourly, but because we'd been having an unheard of streak of beautiful weather, and I saw the emergency vehicles had coalesced on the next block, also not unusual, because there is a huge, historical hotel there that is now used to house the elderly and if a crane isn't tipping over while workers are repairing the building someone is calling for an ambulance every thirty minutes. But this time it wasn't the Faust, it was the equally historic theater across the street, The Midway. The roof had fallen in. Problem is no one will admit to owning the building. No one knows who owns the Midway. Over the past decade several groups have tried to raise public awareness about restoring the Midway, but no owner could be contacted to even talk about selling. So, it sat. And it rotted. And it sat. And it rotted. And eventually the roof fell in.
The roof of the Midway theater collapsed
I contacted the mayor's office that afternoon to inquire why a landowner would be allowed to let a structure on a very busy street sit and rot until it became a public danger, but of course I received no adequate explanation. A week later I have seen no effort to stabilize that building. No one has stepped forward to take responsibility for this symbol of our collective decay and collapse. My guess is whatever powers that be are conspiring to relieve whatever slum lord who allowed this to happen to abrogate his responsibility for fixing it. Hell, that person will now probably make a profit and the city will be left holding the bag for demolishing the building. Rockford. I like it here. But I also like boxing, cheap whiskey, and the poetry of Charles Bukowski. I'm far from being shocked by any act of corruption, ignorance, or hatred I see, so all that's left are the good surprises. The times when the underdog wins. Instances of the forsaken and condemned defying expectations and doing the right thing for the right reasons. It happens. It happens here every day. Sometimes a place can be rotten but the people as decent and honest and willing to change for the better as anywhere else. A good power clean of the filth and sewage that's piled up over generations in this city's places of influence and power might be all that's needed to give Rockford, Illinois a new lease on life. Too many parasites and blood-suckers in this city feeding on the carcass of the past and fending off anyone who wants to make a change with a blind rage to think it will be easy, but it has to be done. Too much federal money simply being poured into a trough for hogs to feed on while no one seems to be offering the oversight to how those funds are allocated to think anyone really cares or wants to make an effort. There's apathy and there's learned helplessness and there's cynicism here. Maybe this city will never get up off its knees. Maybe there are forces that benefit from a city and a workforce and a populace that has been trained to expect less than nothing. Maybe we all just feed off of each other's sense of helplessness like the Ouroboros, but I'll tell you what, and maybe this is just a spurt of three a.m. bitterness: when the roof collapses on a building in the geographic center of your town, get off your ass and either put the fucking roof back on or at least show enough backbone to make someone get their ass down their and show some sense of civic responsibility. Someone wanted to profiteer from holding that building hostage until it became profitable, and now I want to see that person down there taking responsibility for yet another embarrassment to a city that is too often embarrassed by this type of invisible leadership.
When you live in Forbes' ninth most dangerous city you either learn to adapt to the limitations of the place you live in, or you become bitter and cynical about everything. Fortunately, the Chamber of Commerce here in Rockford, Illinois, while not very good at attracting business to the Downtown area, turns out to be quite good at comedy. My favorite kind of comedy: the kind derived from others' absolute obliviousness to the context of language and the fact that words have meanings. This banner, on the East State Bridge, is still hanging. It is number two of the four Poem Photo series. Every night is comedy night in Rockford, Illinois.
Recently, the Rockford Area Convention and Visitors's Bureau unleashed their latest brainchild.... the Misery Loves Company Campaign. If it were just an instance of a private company spending a lot of money to create a tone-deaf public relations campaign, that would be none of my business, but when this bureau over and over creates moronic campaign, not realizing words have meanings, and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax payer money, someone should step in an stop them. It's not funny.
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