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.

Haiku poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg

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.

Pin It

 

Send in the Schizoid Kid: A Life Observed From the Outside

I found out I had Schizoid Personality Disorder by accident. I was fifteen years old, sitting in the waiting room of my psychiatrist's office. His door was open, and I heard him tell his secretary, “Send in the schizoid kid.” That was me.

Like most people who hear the word schizoid, particularly a fifteen-year-old in the early 1980s, I thought it meant schizophrenia. Nobody sat me down and explained the diagnosis. Nobody gave me a pamphlet describing what it might mean for the rest of my life. There was no internet to consult when I got home. There wasn't even much of a popular vocabulary for discussing these things. The diagnosis would not be formally revealed to me until decades later, when that same psychiatrist testified during my disability hearing and confirmed that Schizoid Personality Disorder was indeed what he had diagnosed me with as a teenager. By then I had already spent most of my life living it.

Schizoid Personality Disorder is a strange diagnosis partly because its defining characteristics involve absences: little desire for close relationships, preference for solitary activities, apparent indifference to praise or criticism, emotional detachment. Years ago, when writing about my book Submerged Structure, I described it as a disorder involving something missing, complicated by the fact that the person missing it may not miss it—or may not know exactly what he is supposed to be missing.

I don't know if I would describe it exactly that way today. One of the difficulties in writing about something you've lived with for more than forty years is distinguishing the condition from the person. Which parts are symptoms? Which are adaptations? Which are simply personality? Which resulted from experiences that had nothing to do with a psychiatric diagnosis at all? After this long, I don't know where one ends and another begins.

What I do know is that much of my life has felt like an exercise in observation. When I was younger, I consciously practiced behaviors other people appeared to perform automatically. Eye contact. Smiling. Shaking hands. Even walking correctly could become something to think about rather than simply something to do. I watched people and tried to determine what was expected of me. Years later I described this process as translation. Life required continually translating myself into a persona comprehensible to people who had never needed to consider that the social language they spoke naturally might be a foreign language to somebody else.

Then, in 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation appeared on television. My favorite character was Lieutenant Commander Data. Data was an android. He was intelligent, capable and sentient, but he lacked human emotions and was fascinated by them. He observed the people around him. He studied their behavior. He attempted humor. He tried to understand friendship, affection, grief and all the strange contradictions humans accepted without seeming to notice them. I identified with him immediately. I wasn't an android trying to become human, obviously, but emotionally the metaphor was almost embarrassingly accurate. Data was doing consciously what everyone around him did instinctively. I knew something about that.

Today there is an enormous vocabulary surrounding experiences that barely had a public vocabulary when I was fifteen. Neurodivergence. Autism spectrum disorder. Masking. Sensory processing. Social communication differences. Spend a few minutes online and you can find thousands of people discussing experiences that previous generations might never have described publicly.

I don't know exactly what to make of it. When I later went to college and studied psychology, the profession seemed considerably more confident about these categories and their prevalence. Certain disorders affected a certain percentage of the population. Diagnostic categories had boundaries. At least that was the impression presented to students. Now reported diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder have increased enormously, and people publicly identify themselves as neurodivergent in numbers that would have seemed astonishing when I was young.

Why? I don't know. Diagnostic criteria have changed. Awareness has changed. Parents and teachers know what to look for. People who once would have gone undiagnosed can now be recognized. Stigma has changed. Self-reporting has changed. Whether those explanations account for everything, or whether something else is happening as well, isn't something my own experience qualifies me to decide. Nor do I know what diagnosis I would receive if I were fifteen years old today.

That question interests me, but I don't want to rewrite my life using terminology that didn't exist when I lived it. Schizoid Personality Disorder and autism are not interchangeable diagnoses. I can't travel back forty years with today's diagnostic manuals and today's understanding of neurodevelopment and submit the fifteen-year-old version of myself for reassessment. All I can report reliably is what the experience looked like from inside.

Increasingly, though, I can see what it did to my work. For years I made a distinction between the Outlaw artist and the Outsider artist. The Outlaw understands the rules and deliberately breaks them. The Outsider may never have understood why the rules existed in the first place. I once fancied myself an Outlaw. Eventually I began to suspect I had been an Outsider all along.

That distinction changed how I understood my poetry. Much of my writing has involved looking at ordinary human behavior as though it weren't ordinary. Customs, relationships, ambitions, status, work, sex, religion, death, possessions—the peculiar machinery of being human becomes visible when you aren't completely absorbed in operating it. Eventually that same observational habit moved increasingly toward the physical world: birds, roads, weeds, rivers, abandoned buildings, animals, signs and objects people have discarded. The bicycle somebody pulled out of the Rock River. An office chair sitting strangely in a window. Things encountered while walking through Rockford that thousands of other people may have passed without needing to stop.

Haiku turned out to be particularly compatible with that way of experiencing the world. You don't have to explain everything. You notice. That is essentially the method behind Hike You!, the six-year walking and haiku project I've created with photographer Ryan Davis. We walk through the city. We encounter something. Ryan photographs it. I write about it. It sounds almost ridiculously simple. Maybe it is. But I've come to realize that observation has been one of the continuous threads running through my life. When participation isn't automatic, observation becomes unusually important.

The same contradiction appears elsewhere in my work. Someone reading the diagnostic description of Schizoid Personality Disorder might reasonably expect me to have spent my life withdrawing from other people, and certainly I've done plenty of that. Solitude isn't something I tolerate until something better comes along. It is my natural state. Yet I founded Zombie Logic Press. I edited Zombie Logic Review. I've published other writers. I've organized projects. I've participated in Rockford's literary and artistic community. I've collaborated with artists. I've spent years documenting the history and peculiarities of the city where I live. Those things require other people.

The younger version of me once wrote something that is difficult for the older version to dismiss: “I want to be with you. I want to be part of the scene. I want to be human.” I don't think I'd say it quite that way anymore. I no longer believe there is some examination in human behavior I'm required to pass. But I recognize the person who wrote it.

What I've actually done, perhaps without realizing it, is construct alternative methods of participation. Writing is one of them. Publishing is another. Collaboration is another. Walking through a city with a photographer and returning with a poem is another. They allow connection without requiring me to experience connection exactly the way someone else does.

That brings me back to Submerged Structure. There used to be a sign along Route 72 between Byron and Oregon, Illinois, beside the Rock River. I saw it repeatedly when I was young. It read SUBMERGED STRUCTURE, warning that something was underneath the water. You couldn't see it from the surface, but it was there and needed to be accounted for. I couldn't stop thinking about those words. Eventually they became the title of a book.

At the time, I thought the sign was a nearly perfect metaphor for Schizoid Personality Disorder. Something was submerged within me. Maybe it had broken away. Maybe it had never developed. Maybe it remained somewhere inaccessible beneath the surface. Other people couldn't see it, and I couldn't adequately explain it. I am less certain now that anything needs to be recovered. That's one of the things forty years can change.

I don't know whether today's explosion in the language of neurodivergence will ultimately make these experiences easier for younger people. I hope it does. I hope a fifteen-year-old sitting in a psychiatrist's waiting room today doesn't have to accidentally overhear what someone has decided is happening inside his own mind. I hope somebody explains it to him. I hope he gets to ask questions. And I hope he understands that a diagnosis may describe something important about him without necessarily providing the definitive explanation of who he is.

I don't have a program to offer people with Schizoid Personality Disorder, autism spectrum disorder or any of the other conditions we now gather beneath an expanding vocabulary of human neurological difference. I'm barely able to understand my own experience. But I have forty years of evidence: poems, books, photographs, strange little observations about human behavior, publishing projects, collaborations and walks through Rockford. There is a book called Submerged Structure. There is even an old poem called “Away Message,” in which I imagined myself in geosynchronous orbit around a lost moon of Jupiter—present, but very far away.

Maybe that's what my work has been doing all this time: sending messages from wherever I am. I don't know whether someone younger, newly diagnosed or simply struggling to understand why the world seems to operate according to rules everyone else received in advance will find anything useful in those messages. I hope so. I can't give them a map, but after forty years of wandering around out here, I can leave a few signs.

Pin It

Tea With the Tigress: Ten Years Inside the Strange Machinery of a Life

I don't think Tea With the Tigress is primarily a book of love poems, although love is everywhere in it.

I don't think it's primarily a book about sex, although there is plenty of that too.

And despite the number of poems involving death, loneliness, aging, memory, physical vulnerability, poetry, absurdity, wolves, celestial bodies, Richard Brautigan, used clothing, zombies, alcohol, buses and people behaving badly, it isn't really a book about any of those things either.

I think Tea With the Tigress is a book about being returned to the world.

That is much easier for me to see now than it was when the book appeared in 2023.

The subtitle is Poems 2010–2020, which makes the collection something of an accidental autobiography. The poems weren't written to document a decade. They accumulated while a decade was happening. When gathered together, however, they preserve something a deliberately written memoir probably couldn't: the strange proportions by which a life is actually experienced.

Huge things sometimes occupy three lines.

A ridiculous thing can occupy a page.

Sex becomes astrophysics. A trip becomes a joke. A flower becomes an existential event. The human heart becomes machinery. An answering machine becomes an excuse to make jokes about dead composers.

And somehow all of it belongs together.

The opening poem, "Tigress," contains the proposition upon which much of the book operates:

when a wise man meets
Tigress in the jungle, he
says, thank you, my love

It is funny, but it isn't merely funny. The tiger isn't defeated. The tiger isn't domesticated. The supposedly wise man recognizes what has arrived and gives thanks for it.

That's a pretty good introduction to the next eighty pages.

The World Comes Back

Reading the old Zombie Logic Blog alongside these poems makes the decade feel much less abstract.

There I am watching horror movies at ridiculous hours. Collecting Monster Club artifacts. Playing old computer RPGs. Writing about Hot Wheels, Queen albums, Hamm's beer signs, pennies, fantasy football, poetry feuds, Richard Brautigan, bad jokes and things I found on my hard drive. I invent Dr. Millard Rausch's post-zombie-apocalypse biography. I create imaginary Outsider Poetry organizations. I remember motel rooms. I make jokes about Presidential Physical Fitness Awards.

And I keep writing poems.

It would be easy to dismiss all of that as clutter. I don't anymore.

It's the material of the life.

One of the smallest poems in Tea With the Tigress is "Avocation":

since you never
had time
to behold
this particular
downspout
I went ahead
and did it
for you.

That little poem may explain a surprisingly large portion of my work.

Someone has to look at the downspout.

Someone has to remember the forgotten movie, the weird sign, the motel, the bus station, the ridiculous conversation, the object nobody else thought worth saving. Someone has to look at all the supposedly insignificant things while everyone else is busy looking at the significant ones.

That was what Zombie Logic Blog was doing during these years, too.

And apparently so was I.

Jenny Enters the Poems

But there is another enormous presence in Tea With the Tigress: Jenny.

Not simply Jenny as subject, but Jenny as an alternative way of encountering the world.

One of my favorite examples now is "May." The speaker is in his laboratory "pissing away April" while she is in her studio preparing the colors of the coming month. He wants to interrupt her but fears that doing so will cause "Garbageman Green / Peonies" and "Poopsicle Lilies" to erupt from him.

Having recently revisited the old Zombie Logic posts, that poem suddenly looks almost documentary.

Again and again in those entries, I wander into a room and Jenny has made something.

Sometimes I understand it.

Sometimes I don't.

Sometimes it takes me four paintings to figure out what she's doing.

The domestic world of these poems isn't presented as retreat from the larger world. It is where the larger world keeps appearing. Tea, paintings, dresses, desks, flowers, food, bodies and jokes continually open trapdoors into something enormous.

"Waiting" may be the clearest early statement of it. Love is compared first to an apple harvested too early, then startlingly to a heart awaiting a surgeon's scalpel, and finally to tea being prepared for afternoons of conversation at a shared desk. The poem ends with two people occupying the same room separately, waiting for their love "to steep."

That double desk may be one of the most important locations in the book.

Not Paris.

Not Greenwich Village.

Not some mythical poet's garret.

A double desk.

Two people making things.

The Body Becomes Strange

The body in Tea With the Tigress is never entirely dependable.

Sometimes it is erotic. Sometimes comic. Sometimes cosmic. Sometimes it is essentially a machine whose warranty has become questionable.

In "What Makes Me Tick," the speaker's mechanical aortic valve becomes something simultaneously industrial and alive:

My St. Jude 27 vavgj-515
Mechanical aortic valve
Thuds like a war bird's wings
In a hummingbird feeder.

That's one of the central transformations of the collection.

The machinery doesn't destroy the poetry.

It becomes poetry.

Later, in "Changing Lanes On an Empty Highway At 3:22 A.M.," the speaker takes inventory of medications, operations, age and diminishing speed, then cautiously moves into the passing lane anyway. He knows something "younger, faster, / More capable" will eventually overtake him.

But for a moment he accelerates.

That strikes me now as one of the key poems in the collection.

There is no grand declaration of triumph.

The car changes lanes.

That's enough.

And Then There Is Sex

There is a lot of sex in this book.

Some of it is tender. Some is ridiculous. Some becomes astronomy, geography, classical music, wine criticism or military history because apparently simply describing sex would have been too straightforward.

"The Yellow River" turns a drunken navigational error in bed into a disastrous military incursion and concludes, perfectly, "War is hell."

"Sunday" sets up an elaborate sexual encounter before revealing in its final joke that the activity under discussion is apparently doing the taxes.

"Astrophysics" calculates a kiss along the Y axis of a shoulder as though intimacy were celestial navigation.

This is important because the erotic poems aren't really interruptions of the more serious material.

They are the same material.

The body that can break is also the body that desires.

The body that ages still reaches for another body.

The body that contains machinery still wants to dance.

Mortality doesn't negate appetite in this book. Mortality makes appetite urgent.

The Poet as Fool

There is also an argument about poetry running through Tea With the Tigress, and the poet generally loses it.

Good.

"The Old Hermit Speaks of Poetry" imagines poems escaping like ducks from a broken pen. Instead of chasing them, the old poet drinks his wine and wanders into the hills, only to discover that the poems have been waiting there all along—in rocks, trees and a brook laughing at the fool searching for them.

"Discourses In Poetics" takes the solemn master-and-acolyte tradition and slowly dismantles it until the Master is apparently attempting to access someone's bank account.

That's closer to my conception of poetry than any manifesto I could write.

Poetry matters tremendously.

Poets should therefore probably not be trusted with it.

The dedication page establishes the governing philosophy before the collection properly begins, quoting my middle-school principal Joe Parks: "Mr. Vaultonburg, you amuse only yourself."

Forty years later, that seems less like criticism than permission.

The Old World Is Still There

The book isn't entirely domestic renewal and comic eroticism.

Older ghosts keep wandering through it.

"Playing the Short Stack," which we've just encountered again while rehabilitating the Zombie Logic archive, reduces an entire losing position to a poker table where the speaker can't formulate a comeback because he can't even see his opponent behind her mountain of chips.

"Pockets" imagines wearing a dead stranger's Salvation Army suit while typing poems on a Smith Corona and occasionally checking the pockets to see whether the previous owner left instructions.

"Beaten" needs four lines:

Every face
At the bus station
Is a torn
Lottery ticket.

Those poems come from the same imaginative territory as the older Zombie Logic material we've been excavating: buses, bars, thrift stores, motel rooms, people who have lost, people who are still playing anyway.

But something has changed.

The speaker isn't quite as trapped inside that world anymore.

He can look back at it.

From Tigress to Wolves

The final portion of the collection begins to sound noticeably different.

The poems become quieter.

More elemental.

Wolves appear. Trees appear. The moon appears. Solitude stops being merely isolation and starts becoming a landscape.

"Unravel" may be the hinge:

as i unravel
I become miles of new thread
to weave with again

That poem now sounds almost prophetic.

By the time we reach "Lilacs," the heart is described as a bomb shelter emerging from an "endless / Winter of discontent." The speaker remains wary of love, but the window is open.

And then comes "Full Wolf Moon 2020":

full wolf moon bays down
on grey, oily streets howling
for its lost lover

Read from the vantage point of 2026, it is difficult not to hear the poet who would eventually write Small Songs for Weary Travelers beginning to emerge.

The attention is changing.

The jokes aren't gone. The weirdness isn't gone. The city isn't gone.

But the poems have started looking outward.

Tea With the Tigress

That's why I think the title is better than I previously understood.

The Tigress isn't simply a woman.

She isn't merely love or sexuality either.

The Tigress is life when it becomes dangerous enough to be worth approaching again.

The wise man doesn't conquer her.

He doesn't explain her.

He meets her.

And says thank you.

Across Tea With the Tigress, the speaker repeatedly does exactly that. He says thank you to love, sex, absurdity, art, jokes, bodies, mechanical parts, memories, old clothes, bad decisions, flowers, wolves, buses, darkness and another day in which something strange might still happen.

The book ends near grief, but it doesn't end in defeat. "End Punctuation" imagines two people leaning into one another like parentheses around the story of their love.

That's an extraordinarily appropriate image for the collection.

Because Tea With the Tigress is itself a set of parentheses.

2010–2020.

Ten years enclosed between them.

Inside are several lives, a tremendous amount of nonsense, some darkness, quite a bit of sex, a mechanical heart, a double desk, a woman making paintings in the next room, wolves gathering at the edges, and a poet gradually discovering that surviving the world and paying attention to it may actually be the same activity.

The copyright page credits Jenny Mathews with the cover and illustrations for "Halloween 1974" and "The Perfect Crime," while Tré created the remaining artwork and provided design and editing help. That makes the physical book itself strangely appropriate: other people helped surround these poems with images and give the decade a shape.

And perhaps that's what I see most clearly now, after going back through the old blog.

I thought I was wasting an astonishing amount of time.

Watching movies. Writing jokes. Collecting things. Looking out windows. Making blogs nobody seemed to read. Falling in love. Getting older. Writing poems about downspouts.

Turns out I was living.

And fortunately, I wrote some of it down.

Pin It

The Poetry Reading

Poetry Reading

The Uptown Cultural Center's
Liason for Community Education
Steps to the podium and gives a brief speil
About the essential nature
Of poetry in the community,
And how poetry is for everyone,
Then sneaks off through a back door
The moment the poetry begins.
I see her in her office
With her feet up
Reading Cosmopolitan.
As the poems about oppression 
And loneliness begin in earnest,
The poets read their poems
About the callousness
Of a public apathetic
To their sacrifices,
Then disappear one by one
After reading
Until finally it's just me,
The open bar,
And poetry...

Again.

-Thomas L. Vaultonburg Pin It

More Late Night Notes From an Outsider Poet

Time for one last Rockford Files tonight, which may put the cap on season number one, which I have watched in one week. 

On Friday there is a Charles Bukowski reading here in Rockford, and I think I might read. The format is that one reads their favorite Bukowski poem, followed a poem of their own. I did some recordings earlier in the week and posted them on SoundCloud. 

Also today I finished the team page for the Rockford Pages outsider poetry slam team. Looks like it has decided to snow after all outside. Doesn't make much difference to me, I have nothing scheduled this week until Friday. Just watching Rockford Files, hanging out with the kids, and creating team pages for Yakima, Walla Walla, Crested Butte, Hell, and Buttzville. 

Jim Rockford is in Las Vegas. Driving a lime green VW bug. And he got hit over the head.  Pin It

Noir Outlaw Poetry From Zombie Logic Press

Mostly I'm comfortable publishing Outsider Poetry, Surrealism, and Dada at Zombie Logic Press and Zombie Logic Review because I have what i think is an innate grasp of those styles, but the next book from Zombie Logic Press, which is now imminent, The Blood Dark Sea, is a marvelous book of Outlaw Poetry in the movie noir style. It was written by Rockford poet Dennis Gulling, a writer I have known a long time and respect very much. I'm proud to own the press that will be making the first full-length collection of this mostly unknown writer available to the world. I say mostly unknown because Dennis Gulling is mysterious, even to me. I know we both published in the small presses in the late 80's and early 90's. I know we did poetry readings together at Cafe Esperanto and other places in Rockford, and I know he is thought of by many in the know, including Mas Tequila editor Richard Vargas, and co-founder of the Outlaw Poetry movement and his mentor Todd Moore, as the region's finest poet. The poems in Blood Dark Sea will bear this high praise out. 

Just this week I got a quote for the first press run of the book, and I think if I have the energy and don't encounter any setbacks with my ongoing dental work I may have it ready for the printer as early as late next week. I can't resist just laying down a little taste here as a teaser, but also to motivate me because I know it's time for people to see this book. This is an example of the crime noir Outlaw Poetry I'm talking about.

VEGAS

The ring on her finger
Felt like a noose around her neck
So she threw everything she had
Into 3 garbage bags
While he was at work
And stuffed them into the trunk
Of her ‘78 Bonneville
Took the $200 he had in a roll
In the back of his underwear drawer
Along with the .22 automatic
He never bothered to register
She drove the 96 miles to Vegas
To work the $200 into something solid
Sold the gun for $20
At a gas station along the way
To some fat guy in a pickup truck
Loaded with old barbed wire and rusty pipes
When she hit the Golden Nugget
She didn’t even stop to check in
Turned the whole bankroll into chips
And made a beeline for the blackjack table
Walked away about an hour later
With $30 and a lump in her stomach
As hard as her luck
Didn’t have anywhere else to go
But back home
He didn’t say anything 
When she walked through the door
He didn’t have to
She went into the bedroom
Curled up on the bed
And stared a hole in the wall

Artwork from The Blood Dark Sea by Jenny Mathews

     What amazes me about the poems in this book is how elegantly they delve into some really dark subject matter, but are never once prurient, or mean-spirited. There's humanity to these observations of people in some pretty awful situations. But there's also a sense of humor and no judgement. These things happen. The Blood Dark Sea is the kind of book where you can be glad they are happening to someone else, and a poet with a keen eye and flair for the subject matter is there to report back, so to speak. 

I hope you'll check back in a few weeks when it is available. Pin It

Playing the Short Stack

For almost a decade I've been joking that I was a better poet twenty years ago than I am now, and I'm not getting any better. Well, it doesn't seem much like a joke anymore, so I had a brainstorm: I have twenty-five years of journals of poems I started, finished and rejected, or just wrote titles I found were amusing sitting around doing nothing. Here's one I found that I'd like to work on here and now. It's titled "Playing the Short Stack," and I wrote it while I was living at the Clayton House Motel, an infamous flop house here in Rockford known for prostitution, drug dealers, and all sorts of villainous scum. Unfortunately, I was only interested in unlimited air conditioning and cable television in my three months there and didn't see any of that. I did eat my first Krispy Kream donut, watch two nights of Monster Fest, and spend my very last dollar before getting another job and leaving that place. This was during the first phase of Texas Hold Em Poker exploding into the American consciousness, and for a while I enjoyed watching it on the television.

This picture shouldn't be here.

Playing The Short Stack

"Your 'All In'
Ain't much of nothin,'
Because you ain't got nothin'
Except a loser's hint
Of a bluff,"
She said,
And I would have
Snapped off something equally
Devastating back but
I couldn't even see her
Behind all those chips. Pin It

Unwitting Outsider Poetry From Thursday

I wrote a poem I didn't write today. For some weird reason I had this flashback to a bartender I worked with almost two decades ago who was always telling me about this goof she was dating. She died suddenly, and I had this bad feeling for her that the end of her life was wasted. The title came to mind and I immediately decided I wouldn't write the poem because I've been there and done that on the foul language and poetry about terrible subject matter. Instead I wrote on Facebook about how I thought of the title then decided to do something else, and my friend Andrew reposted what I said in poetry form, and it seemed like a poem to me. Not the one I was going to write, but a perfectly valid poem about why I didn't write the poem I was going to write, which you now know the story of, too.


Her Last Few Fucks Were Wasted

I just had a sudden urge to write a poem titled
"Her Last Few Fucks Were Wasted,"
and even ten years ago
I would have too,
but instead I walked
to the bathroom,
trimmed my nosehair,
and decided this poem need not exist.
You're welcome.


Pin It

Rockford Poetry

I never knew being associated with the search term Rockford Poetry was important to me. Until yesterday when Jenny told me it was important to me to be associated with the search term Rockford Poetry. Because I am the most widely published poet in Rockford (even though I quit publishing in 1996) and because I have the only serious literary press in Rockford I assumed if I looked for Rockford Poetry I'd be right there.

Wrong.

Not only wasn't I right there, I wasn't anywhere 

Having  been born in Swedish American hospital, which I can all but see from the window of the building that serves as Zombie Logic Press headquarters, and having published poetry here since 1997, I feel awful that I haven't been able to make Google consider my efforts more noteworthy. I think that will change in the coming years, as I have plans to publish the first books of several up-and-coming poets from America's 3rd most dangerous city. Already I have published the first book of C.J. Campbell, and later this year we will be releasing an as-yet untitled poetry book by noir poet Dennis Gulling, a protege of Todd Moore, perhaps the most published and widely read poet the Rockford area has ever had.

After my heart surgery two years ago it became crystal clear to me I wanted to do my part to make Rockford more than just a punchline to people from other cities who only hear we have been named to another most fat, least educated, most violent or miserable list. 

I have written a piece about the history of Rockford poetry that will be published later this year. In my research for that story I found many times when poetry almost took a hold in Rockford, but eventually fizzled because of egos, in fighting, or lack of support from the community.

I'm not sure what time I have left to accomplish this, or make my contribution, but I hope to do all I can in these coming years to support the poetry scene in Rockford, which I know for a fact has numerous brave, unique, and powerful voices. 

I regret that because of Schizoid Personality Disorder and tremendous social anxiety I won't be able to do readings because it would be an honor to take the stage with some of these writers, but maybe I can use Zombie Logic Press and Zombie Logic Review to give a forum for their voices. 

Rockford Poetry

Pin It

Dumbing It Down - A Poem By Thomas Vaultonburg

As a poet, a good lesson I have learned over the years is to never evaluate the quality of your own work, especially immediately. I had read of an ancient poet, perhaps Ovid, whose advice to poets was to put your work in a drawer for five years before you ever even considered showing it to anyone.

This poem, "Dumbing It Down," was something I found written in a notebook years after I had first written it, and I loved it. I wondered why I hadn't thought it was good enough to include in the rotation of poems I was considering for the next book. Maybe I thought it was too facile.

Now I think of it as one of my favorite poems I have ever written.

Dumbing It Down

I dumbed it down.

I fed it McNuggets

And put it to sleep

With pop tunes.

I made it join

The Republican party.

I drugged it with

Cable television,

I bribed it with

Guilt-free sex

And threatened it

With religion.

I spent a lifetime

Beating it

Into submission and

The ungrateful bastard

Still writes this poem.

My fourth book, Submerged Structure

Update December 11, 2012: A local distributor just bought out the entire first printing of our children's book The Toughskin Rhinoceros Wrangler Company. So that feels pretty good, but means now I have to get cracking on the second printing.

I wish someone would buy out these poetry books, but that seems unlikely.

Pin It