I met Nick in the early spring of ’85. In less than a minute he ‘hit me’ with two haiku. We soon discovered certain mutual interests in addition to poetry. He encouraged me to keep writing poetry after we attended a reading on Walt Whitman’s birthday at his tomb in Harleigh Cemetery. I became enamored of Nick’s poetry and marveled at his use of haiku to reveal truths about his surroundings in Camden and his experience of his brother’s death in Vietnam.
Nick Virgilio at Work.
Nick died in January, 1989. During his re-interment at Harleigh (a story for another newsletter), the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association was formed with the intention of keeping alive his legacy of writing and teaching haiku. I periodically attended the monthly board meetings after Sunday Mass in the basement of Sacred Heart Church. I soon became a regular attendee and began to help with logistics at events designed to spread the word about Nick and his revelatory take on this Japanese form of poetry.
Early on, the Association in partnership with the Haiku Society of America inaugurated the Nick Virgilio Memorial Haiku Competition for 7th through 12th graders. This contest endures and was administered by Nick’s brother, Tony for many years before he too passed away. Since then NVHA Secretary, Robin Palley, and I have received up to 6,000 poems submitted for the competition from students from the US and many foreign countries. We blind review the entries and pass them on for judging by poets from the HSA.
During the board presidency of Kathleen O’Toole, a long-time friend of Nick’s, the Association sought to have the proposed Writers House at Rutgers Camden campus named for Virgilio. After years of negotiations the campaign came to an end. It was decided to build our own Writers House in Camden’s Waterfront South neighborhood. An abandoned property across from the church became available and with funding from American Water, Campbell’s Soup, and PNC Bank, the Heart of Camden Building Association was able to start renovations.
After serving on the board for many years, I assumed the presidency after Kathleen’s retirement. In a list of the events the NVHA produced since Nick’s burial, we celebrate his birthday every June at his gravesite. Every ten years we hold special commemorative events culminating in “I Remember Nick Night” in 2009, and the showing of Sean Dougherty’s engaging, youtube hosted documentary, “Remembering Nick Virgilio”. At Haiku North America, 2011 in Ottawa, Canada, we met Rick Black who undertook, with the editorial assistance of Raffael de Gruttola, the publishing of “Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku” in 2012. The material for the book came from the Rutgers archive of Nick’s papers donated with a generous annuity by Tony Virgilio.
We commissioned playwright, Joseph M. Paprzycki, to write the poignant play, ‘Nick of Time’, which I directed and presented at the Waterfront South Theater in Camden and the Iron Age Theater Festival in Norristown, PA. At Haiku North America, 2017 in Santa Fe, NM, due to lack of theater facilities, we produced a film of the play which was well received by the larger haiku community.
Over the years, we have continued to produce workshops for students and teachers of haiku and related forms in various venues. A couple of them were led by Tom Painting, who successfully guides many students who garnish top prizes in our haiku competition. In the classroom, Therese Halscheid has taught haiku to 5th through 8th graders at Sacred Heart School, one of whom won one of six top prizes in the competition. Robin Palley and I have led workshops at retreats in the Poconos and at the Collingswood Book Festival.
Current Vice President Henry Brann and President George Vallianos.
Starting in 2014, work on the house finally began and took almost 3 years to complete. George Vallianos, our new board president and I took possession on behalf of the NVHA in August 2017. It took almost 8 months to complete undone work on the house, accessibility, roof trim, garden gate, telephone, internet, security, etc. and furnishings. We held our Grand Opening on April 28th and 29th, 2018 to a welcoming crowd which easily exceeded 100 guests. Among them were representatives from a Philadelphia based non-profit, Mighty Writers. They had long sought a location in Camden to launch their literacy programs and felt they had, at last, found a home with us.
We hired a program coordinator in the fall of 2018 and began to host Mighty Writers as well as offering workshops and readings by and for authors from South Jersey. I was moved to tears upon seeing the first class of students walk in the front door.
At our opening we invited the guests to submit haiku which we displayed in the garden on clothesline and our new cherry tree. We also invited haiku poets from all over to email their poems. Prompted by a single unattributed poem still hanging from our tree in March 2019, I undertook the editing and publishing of our first book of haiku and senryu under our own imprimatur, Upright Remington Press. We launched Nick Virgilio Writers House Poetry, Volume 1 (available on Amazon) at Haiku North America, 2019 in Winston-Salem and at our Writers House in Camden. Book projects in the works include an e-book edition of A Life in Haiku from Rick Black’s Turtle Light Press, and a textbook style treatment of Nick’s writing process helmed by emeritus professor from Rutgers, Geoff Sill. In addition, we plan to publish an anthology of winning poetry from our competition winners and runners up over the years and Writers House Poetry, Volume 2.
Concluding, we continue to host Mighty Writers and to develop programs, workshops, and events at our Writers House with the guidance of our new Program Manager, Warren Longmire.
Henry Brann is the Vice President of the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association.