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.

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Flesh Wounds by Thomas L. Vaultonburg | Zombie Logic Press

Flesh Wounds may be Thomas L. Vaultonburg's most autobiographical collection. Written between 1997 and 2004, the poems emerge directly from the years following his mother's death, a period spent working behind bars, in restaurants, strip clubs, country clubs, sports bars, warehouses, and eventually in a tavern he owned with his brother.

Unlike many collections that spend years being revised and refined, Flesh Wounds feels immediate. These poems were not excavated from decades of notebooks and polished into literary artifacts. They were written close to the experiences that inspired them, preserving their rough edges, contradictions, and emotional honesty.

The collection takes its title seriously. The wounds described here are rarely fatal. Instead, they are the daily injuries of ordinary life: failed relationships, dead-end jobs, bad judgment, loneliness, humiliation, lust, disappointment, and self-inflicted damage. Yet the poems refuse tragedy in its conventional form. Again and again, humor appears where despair ought to be. The speaker is frequently reckless, often cynical, occasionally self-destructive, but almost never self-pitying.

Bukowski's influence is evident, particularly in the attention paid to working-class life, bars, sex, and failure. Yet Flesh Wounds is ultimately less interested in romanticizing excess than documenting it. The bartenders, waitresses, drunks, lovers, managers, hustlers, and dreamers who populate these pages are not literary archetypes. They are people observed at close range during long nights spent serving drinks and watching human beings unravel.

What distinguishes the collection is its dual perspective. The narrator is both participant and witness. He is drinking with the crowd while simultaneously taking notes on it. He is implicated in the chaos he describes, but also detached enough to recognize its absurdity. The result is a voice that can be savage one moment and unexpectedly tender the next.

Viewed alongside later books such as Submerged Structure, Flesh Wounds captures an earlier version of the author: angrier, less guarded, more reckless, and more willing to place himself directly at the center of the story. If Submerged Structure often observes the world from a distance, Flesh Wounds lives inside the collision.

The lasting achievement of the collection is its refusal to separate beauty from damage. The poems recognize that some of the funniest stories, strongest attachments, and most revealing moments emerge from periods of profound disorder. Flesh Wounds is not a celebration of self-destruction, nor is it a warning against it. It is a record of survival written by someone who spent years standing close enough to the fire to know exactly how hot it was.

Buy Flesh Wounds By Thomas L. Vaultonburg At Zombie Logic Press

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The Empty Calories

I remember when I was one of the Empty Calories.

Empty Calories Press of the 3rd Mind 1995

My Day As a Worm

     I find my life no more or less grotesque than the day before. I eat a small breakfast of toads and do my coughing exercises. The atmosphere no longer sustains me, and the sun neither warms or cools me. I imagine that I am an eyeless worm of the genus luco luco luci crawling silently beneath the floorboards of your home. Because you have refused to feed me I have gathered my brethren and we have resigned ourselves to digest every molecule of edible protein underneath the foundation of your home, plunging you into the true Silent Kingdom. As the earth begins to rumble I re-assume my bipedal form, salute my brothers, and silently slither home to regurgitate the earth I stole from beneath your feet.

     I can see why that one didn't make it into Detached Retinas.

Mumbling Rock Exhibit

function is destiny

a rock becomes a tree for the convenience

of the impaired audience,

and is rendered useless

as a rock and as a tree.

we are contortions of perception,

allowing an object to assume

its natural form only when our vision

fits neatly around its borders.

light is a magician, a tireless trickster

entertaining an audience of passive

executioners, dodging each other's gaze,

a long stare being eternal concrete

in the other's stony mind gallery.

Benediction

You'll be just one of proposed

Trillions,

Eyelids painted green

Speaking to your cornflakes,

Issued a soul

And taught allergies,

Standing morbidly erect before

Flagpoles

And lying prostrate before museums.

You'll be caught completely by surprise

When Earth leaps up

To meet bone.

The Secret Pudding

In London a man was discovered eating the Queen's secret pudding. The Royal Guard promptly escorted the man from the palace, but were dismayed to discover the very same gentleman in an unusual position with the prince's polo donkey later in the day. The donkey, it is reported, has lodged a formal complaint with the Queen herself. The Queen, taking her tea with the Dutch Ambassador of Cabbage, is said to have taken a personal interest in the case, going so far as to demand photographs in the case that the donkey wants to bring charges. The nameless man, appearing later on the BBC, claims he only staged the event to draw attention to the Queen's secret pudding, which he alleges is made from the aborted fetuses of Princess Grace of Monaco. 

The Empty Calories

I guess at one time some of that must have seemed funny to me. 

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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

Two New Outsider Poetry Blogs Spring Up Overnight

I was really inspired by receiving this wonderful gift from Jenny for my birthday last night

The Polymorphous Humour of Crad Kilodney

Crad Kilodney wrote a book that makes me laugh to this day. It was titled Lightning Struck My Dick. The first time I saw that title I started laughing and still haven't stopped. Crad Kilodney was an Outsider Poet from Toronto who made his books at a copy shop. He founded Charnel House Press and began distributing them on the streets. He was arrested. But kept doing it. Eventually he became somewhat of a fixture in the Toronto literary scene and earned begrudging respect from the academic community. 

I'm not the least bit tired so I created two new Outsider Poetry blogs for my own amusement. The first I titled Rancho Cucamonga Outsider Poetry  and the second, which I actually created first, Kokomo Outsider Poetry Federation  A lot of this tomfoolery distracts from the fact that I have real work to do, including finishing the latest book from Zombie Logic Press, the Blood Dark Sea. Jenny designed a great cover so all that remains now is formatting the book and sending it to a printer. 

I have been trapped in a cycle where I stay up late for several months now, and although I really enjoy it I am accustomed to getting more work done at night than I have been. What I have been doing is watching Barney Miller, Johnny Carson on MeTV, then Night Gallery, The Alfred Hitchcock Show, then finishing the night with Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff. Usually at that point I am so drowsy I am almost too tired to get myself ready for bed properly, which isn't as easy a task as it might seem when you have pills and potions to take. 

Anyway, the book I am holding is titled The Polymorphous Humour of Crad Kilodney, and it is signed by the writer. There are now websites established to archive his work and biography. I used to have quite a large Small Press library, including dozens and dozens of small press journals, chapbooks, and literary zines I appeared in. It is almost all gone now due to my many moves in the past. I'll put this on the shelf next to my first printings of my favorite Charles Bukowski books and show gratitude that I now have a place to do so. 

As part of my new insurance I can sign up for a free one year membership at the YMCA, so I hope to back in the gym soon after doing all my cardio and workouts at home for a year now. I'll probably go get in bed now and start my 48th year sleeping most of the daylight hours away. 

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Why I Couldn't Care Any Less About The Best American Poetry 2015 "Controversy"

I haven't gotten my copy on The Best American Poetry 2015, so I don't much to say about the current controversy where a white man pretended to be an Asian man in order to be published in an American poetry journal. What I do remember is that the editorial process and contributor make-up of the Best American Poetry anthology series has changed quite a bit over the past decade or so. When the series began in 1988 all the editors were older white men and women noted for being part of the academic orthodoxy and selecting poetry for the anthology by similar poets. In fact, they went so far as to continue publishing their dead friends years, or even decades after they were gone instead of really delving into the America poetry scene and finding younger and more diverse voices.

Best American Poetry 1988-2014

,

None of this makes any real difference to me because being a career small press poet I have about as much chance of ever appearing in an anthology like this as I do of playing quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. These are the games people we make fun of play. assholes who have their snout far into the public trough their asses have no idea their crack is showing. The poetry isn't all that great, but the politics ensure whoever edits the series will just publish a certain standard of poetry. In this case Sherman Alexie was the yearly editor and he admits he was just enamored by the title and Chinese sounding name of this entry. 

With this poet exists or not seems irrelevant. I haven't even read the poem yet, and probably won't until I order my copy on Ebay as I do every year now. I actually don't even really have an opinion about this, I'm just trying to get to 500 words and get on with my day of preparing for fantasy football season. I don't like poets. I don't think anyone does, really. And they're right. Because this is the type of petty garbage Plato predicted poets would argue over if they were ever in charge of anything

Unfortunately for readers, there are still a few things a few poets are in charge of. Namely public grants, funding, a few literary journals of note, and some academic writing programs. That's not a lot, and we should all be grateful they don't have any more power than that, but it's just enough power to ruin the perception of poetry the typical non-reader of poetry has about all poetry being written in America at any one time.

Sherman Alexie is a poet who has come closest to being a small press editor in the history of the series. I don't like him, but only because I saw once on his website he told his fans to leave him alone because he was too busy to respond to their questions. Kind of a jerkoff thing to do, but maybe he was just having a bad day. I was running a restaurant at that time, working seventy hours a week, and I never would have dreamed of treating a customer or a fan (if I had one) that way. To each his own. But that's a good example of why most people have a negative opinion of poets, and why they're mostly right in my opinion and experience.

I wanted to say something about race, gender, politics, age, and how all of these things enter into the politics of publishing an anthology like The Best American Poetry, but I don't really give much of a shit. Fight it out over the slop they pour in the trough all you want, I'm happy knowing I'll never be part of that grotesque spectacle of relying on the leavings of others.

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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

Three Things I Want To Believe In

I'm about as cynical and pessimistic as it gets. I'm like Mikey in that old Life cereal commercial. I think everything is fake and it's all bad and no matter what any of does we're doomed. But this summer three different things are giving me hope. There are three things I really want to believe in.

I want to believe that the Chicago Cubs have a chance to win the World Series after 107 years. Not only this year, but for many years to come. As I write this I am watching the Cubs play the White Sox after having won 6 straight games, and 13 out of 14 games. I have to admit after the All Star break when the Phillies swept the Cubs I thought to myself "Here we go again, this team just isn't ready or good enough to make it to the playoffs." Then after they started to gain some momentum in Colorado and beat the hell out of the Pirates, Giants, and Brewers I started to really believe. For forty years I've had Cardinal and White Sox fans taunt me over being a Cub fan. Nothing in this world would be sweeter than to see the Cubs dash off a decade where they won five or six World Series. And with the 4th rated minor league system and a network in place in countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, not to mention mountains of free agent money to spend, I think the future has finally arrived for Cub fans.

Bernie Sanders. I can count the times I've walked into a polling booth and exited feeling really good about who I just voted for on one hand. I even felt betrayed by Obama's first administration and voted for Jill Stein in protest in 2012. Even though Bill Clinton was two of those votes, I've never been excited about feeling I had to vote for Hillary Clinton. I can't quite put my finger on it because I know we have quite a lot in common politically, and it's not because she's a woman (see above), but I've never wanted to feel Hillary Clinton was my only choice. When Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for President I was excited, nit because I believed he had any chance to win, but because it now gave me an alternative, at least in the primary, even though in Illinois the nomination is usually sewn up by the time we vote. I get the Bernie Buzz in my email, and have been for many years, so I was more amused that he decided to run that seriously engaged, but the past couple of months have given me hope that Americans are ready for change. To address the issues of wealth and income equality, racism, sexism, corporate power, and the militarization of our police forces. This week when it was reported that he has taken a lead in the polls in New Hampshire, and that Elizabeth Warren was considering coming out in support of him, I just felt overwhelmed. For once I feel like I want to put my energy and faith behind this candidate. If Warren were to be placed on the ticket as Vice President I just believe we've never seen anything like that in American history. 

The third thing is the Outsider Poetry I have been working on, and poetry in general. The Downtown area where I live is experiencing a Renaissance, and part of that is the arts community. This Fall I will be part of several show at Fall Art Scene, and I have published two books by Rockford writers. Publishing the work of other people has been a real blessing to me and gives me a sense of purpose in the literary community. I have started two separate publications to promote Outsider Poetry, or writing by those who exist and create outside of the norms of culture die to mental illness, being self-trained, or simply having chose no to conform. The one I just stared is called Outsider Poetry Magazine, and the one I have been working on is simply called Outsider Poetry.

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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

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Poems At the End of the World by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

I wrote a book of poems titled Poems At the End of the World. It was published by Subourbon Press in 1992. Then I forgot I had written a book of poems titled Poems At the End of the World until last night when I suddenly remembered after a flood of comments about the end of the world that I had written a book of poems about the end of the world. Then I wondered if I hadn't just made up the part about writing the book of poems about the end of the world, and since everything I had archived was lost long ago I had no way to prove it, I tried to find a copy of the book of poems I had written about the end of the world. And I found only one copy in existence. Here in the WorldCat of books contained in libraries I discovered that Kansas State University has a copy of this book in their Hale Library. Which made me rest easier that I wasn't simply making up the part about having written the book of poems about the end of the world in 1992.

I told Jenny and she asked me what was in the book. I said I didn't remember. And I don't. I know I published five books in rapid succession in the early 90's before I stopped publishing until I started Zombie Logic Press in 1997. But everything I had was lost more than once. A magnificent library of small press zines and books, many signed by writers like Charles Bukowski, Todd Moore, Kurt Nimmo etc. None of that can ever be recovered. 

I'd like to find a copy of Poems At the End of the World just to see what is in it because I don't have copies of whatever poems I wrote back then. I wonder what I had to say about the end of the world. 

Oh, Jenny sent me this picture of me from a few weeks ago when we went out. 

The poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg, in anticipation of the end of the world, decides he doesn't want to enter the next reality with a full bladder. 

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Outsiders, Outlaws, and Then There's Me

I've decided to call myself an Outlaw Poet this week. Last week I was a Zombie Poet. Next week I'm considering being an Outsider Poet. I'm not really any of those things, or aligned with any of those movements in any significant way, but I just feel like I need some movement to help me define my work and who I am.

The Outsider movement seems good because if I decide it's not for me, I can leave and still be in the movement. The Outlaw movement is slightly more problematic because, as Bob Dylan wrote, "To live outside the law you have to be honest," and I ain't falling for that shit.

I guess I just need help defining myself.

When I first started publishing poetry in the late '80s, it was the height—but the unforeseen beginning of the end—of the Small Press movement, defined by journals like The Wormwood Review and poets like Charles Bukowski and Lyn Lifshin. Thousands of small zines published a rogues' gallery of poets who wrote about bad behavior, freedom, and trying to survive as poets outside the universities and without the grants the academic circle jerkers distributed among themselves.

It really was a fun and golden time for the poetry scene, and one I was immersed in from a very young age, learning my first lessons from poets like Todd Moore, Ron Androla, Kurt Nimmo, and Gerald Locklin. Even the immortal Charles Bukowski seemed to break his own rules and return encouraging letters to me without calling me a talentless punk.

That era ended with the internet.

What needs to be understood is that before the internet, it often took months, even a year, to collect submissions for a literary review, make editorial decisions, print it, and send it out to everyone who was in it. Now this can be done almost instantaneously, which takes a lot of the sacred nature out of the process.

You used to wait, and wait, and wait, and when that zine finally arrived in the mail, you looked to see who else was in it. You knew them because you knew they went through the same process you did, and you savored the whole thing from cover to cover. The internet has made this process too accessible, too easy, and therefore disposable.

Many of those poets from the golden age of the small presses are gone, like Todd Moore, the first Outlaw Poet. Many simply gave up trying to reach an audience and went back to lives outside the universities and MFA programs. Many have dispersed into the Outsider and Outlaw movements, and some have learned how to use the internet to boost themselves into the public consciousness.

It's always sad to come in at the end of an era. To be the last generation of anything.

There's nothing like the printed word. There's nothing like the smell of paper and that unmistakable scent of a fresh Kinko's copy. There's nothing like waiting to improve one's discipline. And there's nothing like sharing a common love to create fellowship.

That's what's gone, for the most part: the fellowship.

In February, the numbers told me more people read my work on the internet than in the entirety of the words I have printed on pages. But just knowing someone is holding your book in their hands creates a bond the cyber world will never duplicate.

I still haven't found the movement that's right for me. I've jokingly created movements that include just myself, like Reductionism, but even I got bored at the meetings. I just don't think I'm going to be welcomed into anyone else's camp anytime soon.

I have resigned myself to going on alone.

By the way, thanks for coming. Here's a poem.

I'm going to post this one for the first time. I think I was reading Dorothy Parker at the time I wrote it, and it represents a growing desire to incorporate some sort of form into my poetry. At least as an experiment.

It's Hell

It's Hell you say
As you assay
With a pro's cache
The chemicals we
Have procured to allay
The night's malaise

It's Hell you attest
But without the interesting
Party guests
The assassins
The buggerers
And the incest

It's Hell I agree
This eternal thrashing
In the scree
And watching you slither
Twixt debauches
Tailored more to you
Than me

August 2026 update: I guess all this time later I can tell you what I really think. All those poets who identified themselves as Outlaw Poets always struck me as the losers you'd see at the end of the bar who got nothing to say until they get home, then they weave these tall tales about how they're badasses and outlaws whereas if they ever did pipe up in public they'd like just get their ass whooped. The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry is an anthology chock full of losers, pretenders, and posers who write at best mediocre poetry. 

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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.

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