1:4 September 2012 A Hundred Gourds 1:4 September 2012 Welcome to A Hundred Gourds. Our journal's name is taken from a haiku by Chiyo-ni (1703– 1775), who is widely regarded as one of the greatest haiku poets of the Edo period: Haiku Editor – Lorin Ford Haiga Editor – Melinda Hipple, AHG 1.4 Ron Moss, Guest Haiga Editor for AHG 2:1 (December 2012) Aubrie Cox, Haika Edito for AHG 2:2 (March 2013) onward Expositions Editor – John McManus Tanka Editor – Susan Constable Haibun Editor – Mike Montreuil Renku Editor – William Sorlien Webmasters – Ray Rasmussen with Melinda Hipple, Sleiman Azizi, Köy Deli, and Jim Sullivan Copyright © A Hundred Gourds, 2012. All works herein are the property of the authors and artists. No work may be republished or used in any way without their explicit permission. A Hundred Gourds reserves first serial rights and the right to republish all works herein. Images credit: Ron Moss, consulting and contributing artist. Acknowledgements - (PDF Version) Many thanks are due to Lorin Ford, Haiku and Managing Editor of A Hundred Gourds, for her enthusiasm, encouragement and suggestions in this project of converting the web-based issues of the journal to PDF. Ron Moss for the new cover illustration used in the PDF issues. Jim Sullivan, the webmaster of A Hundred Gourds, for providing me with the web files needed to complete the conversions to PDF. Mike Montreuil 2 A Hundred Gourds 1:4 September 2012 Contents Feature 4 Kathleen O’Toole, Nick Virgilio (1928-1989): An American Haiku Master Revisited 5 Haiku 15 Haibun 70 Tanka 86 Renku 107 Haiga 135 Expositions 168 Jack Galmitz, In The Likeness Of Man: Johannes Bjerg’s Penguins 169 Jack Galmitz, Circling Dates: History and the Haiku of Steven Carter 178 Chen-ou Liu, Review of Jack Galmitz's yards & lots 186 John McManus, Review of Bill Cooper's The Dance of Her Napkin 191 John McManus, Review of John Carley's the Little Book of Yotsumonos 193 3 A Hundred Gourds 1:4 September 2012 4 A Hundred Gourds 1:4 September 2012 Nick Virgilio (1928-1989): An American Haiku Master Revisited by Kathleen O’Toole Introduction Who better to reintroduce Nick Virgilio to A Hundred Gourds' international audience than someone who knew Nick personally and was inspired by him to begin on her own haiku path? Kathleen O'Toole also wrote the afterword for Turtle Light Press's recent release, Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, led the panel discussion about Nick's work to mark the 20th anniversary of his passing at the Haiku North America 'Crosscurrents' 2009 Conference and is a member of the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association. We thank Kathleen for her generosity in providing such an informative and timely retrospective for our fourth issue. - Lorin Ford, haiku editor Photo by Rick Black 5 A Hundred Gourds 1:4 September 2012 When Nick Virgilio discovered a copy of Kenneth Yasuda's a pepper pod in the Rutgers University Library in 1963, a door opened that would lead to his becoming one of the most influential masters of English language haiku in the United States. Born in Camden, N.J., he earned a communications degree from Temple University and worked as a sports broadcaster. He gained some renown locally as "Nickaphonic Nick," the irrepressible sidekick to Philadelphia radio personality and sock hop disc jockey Jerry Blavatt. Ultimately, though, Nick found his voice in the elegant, Japanese poetic form of haiku. Over the course of 25 years, he refined his art, cultivating a wide audience for haiku and, more importantly, developing an authentically American iteration of the haiku form through his unique sensibility, his use of imagery, and the music of his haiku. He became one of the most well- known and beloved haiku poets of the 20th century. Through his efforts to introduce haiku to the general public, first in his beloved city of Camden and then nationally through his appearances on National Public Radio, numerous haiku poets were nourished and got their start. His death in 1989 at age sixty, was a great loss to the haiku movement. Despite his renown, a US edition of Virgilio's work was still lacking. In April of this year, Turtle Light Press published a new volume of his work, Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku. Edited by Raffael de Gruttola, a former president of the Haiku Society of America, the book contains 30 old favorites as well as 100 previously unpublished haiku, two essays on the craft of writing haiku, a radio interview with Nick, photos and much more. Early Success According to those who knew him, it was characteristic of Nick to dive wholeheartedly into whatever he did. No surprise, then, that after that first encounter with the haiku form, he immersed himself in it so thoroughly that he published several of his most well-known haiku within two years. His first published haiku (which Nick referred to as "the mother of all the poems"), appeared in the first issue of American Haiku in 1963: spring wind frees the full moon tangled in leafless trees While this haiku skillfully captures the illusion-like quality of many early English language haiku here, Nick was already experimenting ─ using fewer than seventeen syllables and going against the grain with the use of rhyme whenever he thought that a poem demanded it. More 6 A Hundred Gourds 1:4 September 2012 astonishing, his famous "lily" poem took first prize in the very next issue of American Haiku (here reproduced in its original form): Lily: out of the water… out of itself. It was soon followed by another poem cited by many writers of haiku as an early influence: bass picking bugs off the moon. Photo by J. Kyle Keener 7 A Hundred Gourds 1:4 September 2012 An Urban Poet Grounded in Place Nick's fidelity to his hometown of Camden, NJ, which hit hard times when its industry collapsed, is apparent in the following haiku about city life: shadowing hookers after dark: the cross in the park barking its breath into the rat-hole: bitter cold Much has been written about Nick as an "urban" haiku poet and his ability to redefine "nature" as in his oft quoted definition of haiku: "…a moment of connection between nature and human nature" in urban terms. But perhaps the most significant influence that helped him to refine his most iconic haiku was his being deeply grounded in a community within a web of close relationships. Thus, his poems evoke the harsh realities of urban decay in Camden, but also beauty and great poignancy that can be found there: the old neighborhood falling to the wrecking ball: names in the sidewalk the blind musician extending an old tin cup collects a snowflake While it is well known that Virgilio sought out feedback, critique, and affirmation from haiku poets and poet laureates from New York to Tokyo, his primary audience was always his local community. Critics, including deGruttola, editor of the new collection, and Cor van den Heuvel, have noted Nick's desire to bring haiku to the common person, and his instinctive use of the cadences of spoken American English, jazz and popular song. Two decades after his death, his memory is kept alive by priests and former City Hall reporters, diner clientele and fellow church members in Camden and Philadelphia, all of whom vividly remember him "accosting" them with new haiku: "How does this one grab ya'?" 8 A Hundred Gourds 1:4 September 2012 His rootedness ─ living all but a few years that he spent in the Navy and Texas as a sports broadcaster ─ in Camden and his intimate connection to that landscape, that history, those contradictions, enabled him to mine a small geographic space for seemingly endless veins of depth and imaginative ore. city skyline in haze: the stench of the river ─ August dog days the sack of kittens sinking in the icy creek increases the cold "Some people think you have to wear a robe and slippers to write haiku. You know Be true to your experience! I feel that since I did not study in a Zen monastery like Basho, I could not even attempt to write like Basho and I wouldn’t. It would be a phony thing. So I’m a city slicker poet-artist-musician type poet. That’s where I’m comin’ from… If I don’t keep working on my own hypocrisy, what the hell good am I? Really! And that means to grow and become more aware. But some people ... they live in Chicago and they write about the mountains and the seashore. It’s all an escape. Poetry should not be an escape. It’s an 'escape into reality'. I think T.S. Eliot said that." Nick Virgilio, December 22, 1988, Painted Bride Art Center, Phila., PA Elegist of the Vietnam War Nick’s discovery of haiku while seeking an outlet in poetry from the heartbreak of a broken love affair, may be seen to foreshadow what is arguably his most enduring legacy ─ haiku as elegy. When his youngest brother, Larry, who enlisted in the Marine Corps, was killed in Vietnam in July 1967, Nick turned to haiku to keep alive the memory of his impetuous brother ─ a tiny butterfly is helping little brother forget the heat 9 A Hundred Gourds 1:4 September 2012 atop the town flagpole a gob of bubblegum holds my dead brother’s dime and to grapple with his own and his family’s grief: still silent in his closet father’s violin on the darkened wall of my dead brother’s bedroom the dates and how tall Photo courtesy of Monsignor Michael Doyle 10 A Hundred Gourds 1:4 September 2012 It may also be true that this loss, which Nick often spoke of in public readings and interviews, contributed an edge to his haiku, a resonance that echoed classical Japanese haiku and at the same time reached a modern audience looking for ways to make sense of its collective loss.