Working on a Remington manual typewriter, pecking away in his Camden basement, Nick Virgilio could spend years, even decades, trying to find the right combination of words to craft a haiku.
The poet, who died in 1989 at age 60, crafted his poems with the terseness of a telegram that would easily meet the 140-character requirement of Twitter. The brevity of his verse created an indelible image in the reader's mind:
the sack of kittens
sinking in the icy creek
increases the cold
Now, a new book, "Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku" (Turtle Light Press: $14.95), features 130 poems, 100 previously unpublished, all inspired by the Japanese verse form of three lines of five, seven and five syllables.
"There was no doubt in my mind that Nick was an early pioneer of haiku in the States and Canada," says Raffael de Gruttola, editor of the posthumous anthology.
Rick Black, a haiku poet, publisher of Turtle Light Press and a former resident of Bergenfield, hopes the book will introduce Virgilio's work to a new generation.
"His work resonates very deeply within me," says Black, 54, a former reporter for The New York Times who covered the first Gulf War and the Palestinian Intifada. "His poems helped me deal with all of the violence that I had encountered."
"Writing is rewriting," Virgilio said in a December 1988 radio interview reprinted in the book. One of the poems, written for his brother Lawrence who was killed in the Vietnam War in 1967, took 20 years to create. It captured the delivery of terrible news to his family:
telegram in hand
shadow of a marine
darkens our screen door
A former radio announcer and disc jockey, Virgilio had an interest in poetry since high school. He traced his attraction to haiku to 1963 when he came across Kenneth Yasuda's "a pepper pod" at the Rutgers-Camden library.
"I liked the verse and tried a few," Virgilio said. After his earliest work was published, he began exploring the form more deeply. The poet drew much of his inspiration from the city, taking daily walks and collecting material, while setting high standards for his verse.
"It's got to be poetry of the five senses that makes you feel first and think about it afterward," he explained.
In a tribute published in "A Life in Haiku," Monsignor Michael Doyle, pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Camden and a close friend of the poet, said that Virgilio "mined beauty out of the gutters of Camden."
Virgilio was prolific in the last quarter century of his life, according to de Gruttola, who reviewed the poet's work which is held at the Virgilio archive at Rutgers-Camden. "Nick left behind hundreds, if not thousands, of haiku that were never published," says de Gruttola.
Virgilio died of congestive heart failure on Jan. 3, 1989, in Washington, just before he was scheduled to discuss his poetry on the CBS television program "Nightwatch."
He was laid to rest in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, not far from the mausoleum of Walt Whitman, one of his heroes. His grave, marked with a granite lectern, features perhaps his best-known haiku:
lily
out of the water
out of itself