Readers of Nick Virgilio’s Selected Haiku (1988) may remember Nick’s poem about his “palsied mother”:
my palsied mother,
pressing my forehead on hers
this Ash Wednesday
(Selected Haiku, p. 59)
But they may not know that Nick used the same image of his mother in many other unpublished poems which, by connecting his mother with his brother Larry, who died in Vietnam, deepen the emotion of the connection between himself, his mother, and his dead brother:
my palsied mother
admiring the blooming plum
little brother planted
turning from the grave,
leading my palsied mother;
the hot morning sun
my palsied mother
placing a wreath on the grave
faces the cold wind
Thanks to the bequest of Tony Virgilio, and the work of a team from Rutgers University Library headed by Special Collections Librarian Julie Still, these unpublished poems are now available on a website accessible at collections.libraries.rutgers.edu/Nicholas-virgilio-papers. By searching the site with the phrase “palsied mother” or “palsied hands,” readers may find dozens of poems in which Nick contemplates the effect on his mother of the deaths of his brother and father. The result is a far richer understanding of his use of haiku to capture the emotions and tremors of love, death, and the seasons of life.
Because Nick Virgilio was a pioneer in the development of the American haiku idiom, the collection is a stunning resource in haiku poetry and American literature. The collection consists of 11 boxes, which are housed in the Special Collections department of the Robeson Library at Rutgers University-Camden. Each box contains up to 30 folders. Each folder contains about 50 sheets of letterhead paper, on the reverse side of which Nick typed multiple drafts of poems or critical musings on the practice of writing haiku. Some of the folders include correspondence with other haiku poets or with personal friends. All together, there are about 8,250 typed pages in the collection, each page containing from one to 15 items.
The collection and its website are still under construction at this writing. We may look forward to a streamlined portal that will make the collection easier to access, and to an improved search box that will help readers find folders they want to see. For now, readers may go to the “Collections” department of Robeson Library at Rutgers University-Camden, scroll down and click on the “Nicholas-Virgilio-Papers” button, and browse among the many poems, published and unpublished, of Nick Virgilio.
Geoffrey Sill is a NVHA board member and former Department of English chair at Rutgers.