Out of a large archive of unpublished poems found in the files of the English department of Rutgers University in Camden NJ comes Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, a collection of haiku poems by a pioneer of American haiku poetry in the 1960s and one of America’s most beloved practitioners of the art.
There are poems about Camden, NJ, the city where Virgilio was born, and Philadelphia, PA, where he went off to attend Temple University, as well as poems about nature and his friends and family, and, most especially, poems about the loss of his younger brother in Vietnam.
The archive's poems, typed and hand-written on reams of legal-size papers, were all
in various stages of drafts and in different forms, from haiku and
sonnets to poems in longer verse, with Virgilio’s handwriting scrawled
in the margins.
“Most of his haiku reflect his daily routine,” writes the book's editor, Raffael de Gruttola, in the introduction. “He usually rose early and had breakfast at the Elgin Diner, then went for lengthy walks along various paths and trails, sometimes late into the night to record those moments in time that he wrote about in his haiku.”
A haiku poet and former president of the Haiku Society of America, as well as a longtime admirer of Virgilio’s work, de Gruttola sifted through the poems and found those that he felt were “as alive and vibrant today as when he first penned them–and, incredibly, just as relevant.”
Here are a few samples from the 130 poems in this collection:
my brother and I
in the old cemetery
reading epitaphs
sitting on a jetty...
watching a seagull
float on a thermal
my father and I
with no footprints to follow
step into deep snow
on my father’s wrist,
keeping time and eternity:
my dead brother’s watch
above the cloud peak
below the summer moon–
a flight of snow geese
It could take Virgilio years to find the words that he needed to complete a poem. That’s because the secret to writing, according to Virgilio, is rewriting. “Most of ‘em is rewriting and rewriting. My brother’s poem, his funeral, took 15 years." His brother was killed in 1967, but it wasn't until 1982 that Virgilio wrote:
flag-covered coffin:
the shadow of the bugler
slips into the grave
But sometimes, admits Virgilio, the line or word of a poem could strike unexpectedly: “... I was near Robins’ Bookstore where it used to be on 13th and, you know, where’s it... Filbert. And I was talking to somebody and all of a sudden the last line came right through my mind and it completed the poem.”
In addition to de Gruttola’s introduction and Virgilio’s haiku, the book includes a 1988 interview with Virgilio conducted by Marty Moss-Coane that aired on her show, “Radio Times,” a handful of essays by Virgilio on writing and haiku, photos and samples of original manuscript pages, as well as tributes to Virgilio from some of his colleagues and friends.
For more information about Virgilio and his work visit:
http://nickvirgilio.rutgers.edu/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjq6TmbTabc
http://haiku.mannlib.cornell.edu/category/author/nick-virgilio
http://www.keltaskavern.com/people/virgilio.html
http://www.sacredheartcamden.org/FamousNV.htm
And for information about Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, visit:
http://www.haikuhut.com/ahg/ahg13/expositions01.html
http://www.turtlelightpress.com/products/nick-virgilio-a-life-in-haiku/
http://www.turtlelightpress.com/2012/05/magical-moving-virgilio-book-launches/
Showing posts with label haiku. Show all posts
Showing posts with label haiku. Show all posts
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Swimming With My Brother
When we were young boys, my brother and I swam in the surf off Montauk Point.
We spent hours leaning into the strong waves, ducking under as the swirling foam crashed onto the beach, and pulling ourselves back to our feet, only to plunge into the icy water again and swim a few yards before another wave slammed into us and we'd stagger back to shore.
Those were days when it felt like we were swimming inside one of Childe Hassam's sparkling seascapes. The sky was the brilliant blue of childhood, the sea endless and rich with possibilities, and the shore a starting point on which to launch our dreams.
Day after day on those family vacations we sent our dreams sailing out past the lighthouse at Montauk Point, all the way across the wide Atlantic to Spain... and further... never knowing which dreams might reach the other shore and come true and which might evaporate like the mist rising off the sea on a foggy morning.
We swam side-by-side year after year, and we continued swimming together long after our childhood ended and we entered adulthood and our family stopped making our annual summer drive east from northern New Jersey to the end of Long Island.
By then Montauk had changed from a sleepy fishing village to a glitzy town and wharf where tourists could dine in luxury overlooking the harbor or wander through expensive shops, and we had changed, too, each of us setting off on our own journeys.
Yet we continued to swim together... in a sea of words... as we made our way into publishing, working at different houses over the years, and then into journalism, and, finally, into the sea of our own writing.
While I fell in love with stories and books for children, my brother discovered haiku poetry, and some of his poems now appear in a hand-crafted book of his own making called Peace and War: A Collection of Haiku from Israel by Rick Black.
It was in Israel, where my brother worked as a journalist, that he found himself first confronted with these startling images of peace and war. He couldn't write about the ironic juxtaposition of these images in his journalistic reports. But haiku enabled him to capture that sense of irony in surprising ways.
Here are a few samples:
In the book's Afterward, poet (and friend) Kwame Dawes writes that "to see this world, to truly engage this world, the poet has to maintain a dual vision."
Somehow the poems reveal the "contradiction in a land that is at once beautiful and startlingly ugly," Dawes notes, "a world that achieves peacefulness even while war is constantly present."
"There is a plea for hope in the final verse...," Dawes concludes. "In many ways, it will become for you, as it has for me, a deeply felt prayer."
It's been years since I swam with my brother off Montauk Point. Yet holding his book in my hands, I can taste the sea again and see his words rising off the page like early morning mist and hear in his voice the call of gulls and the sound of the foghorn.
His poems contain the feelings that surge within one's heart on touching the sea or, really, any part of the world's mystery. And reading through these poems, it feels as if we're swimming once more off the coast of our childhood, each poem a reminder of the dreams and prayers that we shared years ago... and still share today.
If you'd like to learn more about Peace and War or Rick Black's work as a book artist, visit his website: http://www.turtlelightpress.com/
And if you'd like to make your own book, here are a few book-artists who share their thoughts:
http://www.fiveandahalf.net/blog/2006/07/07/a-book-for-your-thoughts/
http://ashevillebookgirl.blogspot.com/2007/04/book-pix.html
http://www.peculiarplanet.com/books/index.htm
http://cailun.info/
And here are a few places where you can attend classes and discover the pleasure of book-making:
The New York's Center for Book Arts at http://www.centerforbookarts.org/newsite/
The San Francisco Center for the Book at http://www.sfcb.org/
BookWorks Studio, Asheville, NC at http://www.ashevillebookworks.com/
If you'd like to try writing haiku, you might check out these resources:
http://www.worldwidefreelance.com/articles/haiku.htm
http://spice.stanford.edu/digests/Japan/haiku.html
http://haikuguy.com/issa/abouthaiku.html
http://www.gigglepoetry.com/poetryclass/Haiku.html
We spent hours leaning into the strong waves, ducking under as the swirling foam crashed onto the beach, and pulling ourselves back to our feet, only to plunge into the icy water again and swim a few yards before another wave slammed into us and we'd stagger back to shore.
Those were days when it felt like we were swimming inside one of Childe Hassam's sparkling seascapes. The sky was the brilliant blue of childhood, the sea endless and rich with possibilities, and the shore a starting point on which to launch our dreams.
Day after day on those family vacations we sent our dreams sailing out past the lighthouse at Montauk Point, all the way across the wide Atlantic to Spain... and further... never knowing which dreams might reach the other shore and come true and which might evaporate like the mist rising off the sea on a foggy morning.
We swam side-by-side year after year, and we continued swimming together long after our childhood ended and we entered adulthood and our family stopped making our annual summer drive east from northern New Jersey to the end of Long Island.
By then Montauk had changed from a sleepy fishing village to a glitzy town and wharf where tourists could dine in luxury overlooking the harbor or wander through expensive shops, and we had changed, too, each of us setting off on our own journeys.
Yet we continued to swim together... in a sea of words... as we made our way into publishing, working at different houses over the years, and then into journalism, and, finally, into the sea of our own writing.
While I fell in love with stories and books for children, my brother discovered haiku poetry, and some of his poems now appear in a hand-crafted book of his own making called Peace and War: A Collection of Haiku from Israel by Rick Black.
It was in Israel, where my brother worked as a journalist, that he found himself first confronted with these startling images of peace and war. He couldn't write about the ironic juxtaposition of these images in his journalistic reports. But haiku enabled him to capture that sense of irony in surprising ways.
Here are a few samples:
a bumper sticker
by the war memorial
"a time to love..."
just an olive tree
and a peeling mural are left
yitzhak rabin square
off to lebanon
air force cadet absorbed in
Love's Labor's Lost
just buried soldier--
too soon for his mother to
notice the crocus
last clouds--In this book are my brother's hopes and dreams for peace in a land filled with images of war. The haiku are riveting, crystal-like in their sharpness, emotionally arresting in their clarity of overlapping images of war and peace in a land so well-known for its messages of hope.
if only the violence would
drift away, too
In the book's Afterward, poet (and friend) Kwame Dawes writes that "to see this world, to truly engage this world, the poet has to maintain a dual vision."
Somehow the poems reveal the "contradiction in a land that is at once beautiful and startlingly ugly," Dawes notes, "a world that achieves peacefulness even while war is constantly present."
"There is a plea for hope in the final verse...," Dawes concludes. "In many ways, it will become for you, as it has for me, a deeply felt prayer."
It's been years since I swam with my brother off Montauk Point. Yet holding his book in my hands, I can taste the sea again and see his words rising off the page like early morning mist and hear in his voice the call of gulls and the sound of the foghorn.
His poems contain the feelings that surge within one's heart on touching the sea or, really, any part of the world's mystery. And reading through these poems, it feels as if we're swimming once more off the coast of our childhood, each poem a reminder of the dreams and prayers that we shared years ago... and still share today.
If you'd like to learn more about Peace and War or Rick Black's work as a book artist, visit his website: http://www.turtlelightpress.com/
And if you'd like to make your own book, here are a few book-artists who share their thoughts:
http://www.fiveandahalf.net/blog/2006/07/07/a-book-for-your-thoughts/
http://ashevillebookgirl.blogspot.com/2007/04/book-pix.html
http://www.peculiarplanet.com/books/index.htm
http://cailun.info/
And here are a few places where you can attend classes and discover the pleasure of book-making:
The New York's Center for Book Arts at http://www.centerforbookarts.org/newsite/
The San Francisco Center for the Book at http://www.sfcb.org/
BookWorks Studio, Asheville, NC at http://www.ashevillebookworks.com/
If you'd like to try writing haiku, you might check out these resources:
http://www.worldwidefreelance.com/articles/haiku.htm
http://spice.stanford.edu/digests/Japan/haiku.html
http://haikuguy.com/issa/abouthaiku.html
http://www.gigglepoetry.com/poetryclass/Haiku.html
Friday, August 19, 2005
A Poet's Perspective on Revision.
A friend of ours wrote recently in response to our comments about revision:
"I often dip into a book entited, Haiku, Volume 1 Eastern Culture. It's one of four volumes written by R.H. Blyth, an expert on Japanese culture and haiku in particular.
"This morning I came across the following passage and wanted to share it with you:
"'Issa is well known, in spite of his fluency and the large number of verses he
produced, to have revised his poems over months and years; for instance, the
following:
Waveringly,
A huge firefly
Passes by.
"'This verse is the result of many revisions, but the final version appears artlesss and the work of a moment.
"'This revision of verse is a revision of experience. The experience had matured in the words of the haiku so that he came to know what he should have wanted to say.'"
"I just thought this was fascinating--and true.
"It's quite often that I'll rework and rework a poem until it teaches me what I wanted to say originally...until I can get closer...as close as possible to the nugget of truth of the moment, of the experience that initially made me sit down to write the poem."
What's interesting and true, too, is how the process of revision not only helps you find what you want to say. Sometimes it reveals something new and unexpected... and takes you off in an entirely different direction.
And yet that direction is somehow where you're meant to be.
What about other writers?
Do you have revision stories to share? Places that you found only because you spent the time and effort revising your poems and stories?
Why not share your experiences with other Wordswimmers?
Let us know what you've found.
"I often dip into a book entited, Haiku, Volume 1 Eastern Culture. It's one of four volumes written by R.H. Blyth, an expert on Japanese culture and haiku in particular.
"This morning I came across the following passage and wanted to share it with you:
"'Issa is well known, in spite of his fluency and the large number of verses he
produced, to have revised his poems over months and years; for instance, the
following:
Waveringly,
A huge firefly
Passes by.
"'This verse is the result of many revisions, but the final version appears artlesss and the work of a moment.
"'This revision of verse is a revision of experience. The experience had matured in the words of the haiku so that he came to know what he should have wanted to say.'"
"I just thought this was fascinating--and true.
"It's quite often that I'll rework and rework a poem until it teaches me what I wanted to say originally...until I can get closer...as close as possible to the nugget of truth of the moment, of the experience that initially made me sit down to write the poem."
What's interesting and true, too, is how the process of revision not only helps you find what you want to say. Sometimes it reveals something new and unexpected... and takes you off in an entirely different direction.
And yet that direction is somehow where you're meant to be.
What about other writers?
Do you have revision stories to share? Places that you found only because you spent the time and effort revising your poems and stories?
Why not share your experiences with other Wordswimmers?
Let us know what you've found.
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