On Nick Virgilio

To begin, I’d like to give tribute to the late Paul O. Williams, who himself gave tribute to Nick Virgilio with the following classic poem:

gone from the woods

the bird I knew

by song alone

Paul had never met Nick in person but knew him by the song of his poems in haiku journals. Paul wrote this memorial poem for Nick when Nick died in January of 1989. It speaks to Nick’s influence that so many poets were similarly motivated to memorialize him, and it is fitting that Nick was one of three beloved poets featured in the Haiku Society of America’s retrospective book, A Haiku Path, published in 1994 (which I edited).

Nick Virgilio was a pioneer of American haiku. He wrote numerous classic haiku and was a tireless and enthusiastic promoter of haiku poetry. While I think we should be careful to assess the poetry and not just be overwhelmed by the passion of his personality, it is clear that Nick had the chops, so to speak. Rod Willmot has written that “A few years ago a journalist who had been overly impressed by Nick’s unrestrained personality called me to ask, ‘But can the guy write?’ ‘He certainly can,’ I answered. In haiku, the best technique is usually invisible, and what looks easy as pie has been cooked with consummate skill.” [from the introduction to Selected Haiku]

Virgilio’s poetic legacy, I believe, lies in two key areas. First, a few of his early poems served to liberate haiku from the 5-7-5 syllable-counting myth. Second, his haiku in remembrance of his brother who was killed in Vietnam serve as a landmark set of deeply emotional poems that have seldom been equaled. When one reads Virgilio’s Selected Haiku book, the poems about his brother veritably lift off the page.

Of Virgilio’s many classic poems, we all know:

Lily:

     out of the water . . .

          out of itself.

This poem was first published in 1963, winning first prize in a contest sponsored by American Haiku (appearing in the journal’s second issue). Perhaps few poems are as well known in English. This notoriety helps to make the poem ripe for parody, and thus I recognize Alan Pizzarelli’s take on the poem:

Lily:

     out of the water,

          out of her suit.

Another classic poem, also first published in American Haiku in 1963, is:

Bass

     picking bugs

                off the moon!

Rod Willmot, in introducing Virgilio’s Selected Haiku, says of “Lily” and “Bass” that “Both poems contributed dramatically to liberating haiku poets from the 5-7-5 tradition of syllabic versification.” Virgilio actually wrote a surprising number of 5-7-5 poems, but the form is invisible in most of them, but it’s surely his non-5-7-5 poems that had the greatest influence on English-language haiku in those early days of English-language haiku. In contrast, a review of the French or French-Canadian haiku tradition shows that it is still predominantly 5-7-5, whereas English-language haiku is not. Nick Virgilio may well be a chief reason why this is the case.

Virgilio’s second haiku legacy is his Vietnam poems. Rod Willmot wrote that “if one decisive event was needed to plunge his writing irrevocably into the fullness of life, it was the death of his younger brother in Viet Nam. Here was a grimness that could not be prettified, a turmoil that could not be stilled.” The poems are heart-wrenching.

One problem with Virgilio is that many of his poems are held up as models when he may not have been fully aware of the haiku tradition—or chose at times to ignore it. For example, many of his poems are single grammatical units, lacking a turn or cut. As moving as it is, a poem such as “the sack of kittens / sinking in the icy creek / increases the cold” reads as a single sentence, tells rather than shows, and may not be the best model for haiku emulation. Many of Virgilio’s poems are relatively long, including quite a few 5-7-5 poems, as already mentioned, so a full assessment of his work would seem to need to reconcile the opposing influences of 5-7-5 versus liberated form, and explore his demonstration or ignoral of the requisite technique of cutting. In his last public reading, Virgilio said “I don’t care if you call what I do haiku, schmaiku, or whatever, but I know what I do is poetry and that’s what I care about.” I heartily agree—poetry comes first. But for those of us who not only wish to promote haiku but to preserve its traditions, a deeper assessment is still warranted.

Consequently, I’d like to propose three challenges regarding the work of Nick Virgilio:

1. That more extensive critical analysis is needed of Virgilio’s work, perhaps a book of critical essays on his work.

2. I am aware that the poems in Virgilio’s Selected Haiku appear in new and revised forms compared with their original publication, and that these revisions were the work of the editor, Rod Willmot. Should the poems be republished in a new edition that restores the original appearance? Also, I believe the book is hard to come by, so a new edition, even if just a reprint of the existing Selected Haiku, would be highly justified.

3. What we have to remember Nick by is just his one book of Selected Haiku. We need to see more of his poetry, and I hope that skilled haiku editors could work with the Virgilio Haiku Association and the estate to cull through Nick’s many notebooks and uncollected poems to put together new collections of his work. A book of interviews and other writings would also be most welcome.

An additional challenge goes to other haiku poets—to emulate Nick in his public promotion of haiku. By this I mean to publish and promote haiku far beyond the confines of established haiku journals and organizations. Few poets have reached Nick’s level of public influence in support of literary haiku.

I’d like to conclude with the last words from Virgilio’s final public poetry reading, at the Painted Bride restaurant n Philadelphia, on December 22, 1988, just twelve days before he died. Virgilio said, “I want you people to write haiku . . . ’cause you might have a great poem in ya. You never know . . .” [from A Haiku Path, page 287]

Postscript

Work on the poetry of Nick Virgilio has grown in the years since the Virgilio panel took place at the 2009 Haiku North America conference, whether as a direct result of my three challenges or not. In 2012, Turtle Light Press published Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, a 138-page collection of poems, three essays, an interview, photographs, and more. It was edited and introduced by Raffael de Gruttola, with an afterword by Kathleen O’Toole and a tribute by Michael Doyle. Also, in 2023 Red Moon Press published Nick Virgilio: Collected Haiku, a 372-page book edited by Geoffrey Sill. Sill’s eleven-page introduction provides biographical and contextual details about the poet and sets the stage for a remarkable assemblage of 921 haiku, meticulously documented year by year. Sill ends his introduction by raising questions that remain to be answered about Virgilio and his poetry. Since 2009, too, the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association has grown extensively, with an active website, frequent online and in-person events, and the operation of the Virgilio Writers House, a writing center that opened in 2018 in Camden, New Jersey. In addition, Rutgers University houses the Virgilio Archive, established in 1999, which you can read about online and where you can search through its extensive collection.

—5 February 2026