By Emma Rawley

If you’re like most people, then haiku is not something you’re familiar with beyond high school English class. The form itself isn’t very complicated: only three lines with 17 syllables and no set meter or rhyme scheme. Though they are not as complex as Shakespeare’s sonnets or Milton’s Paradise Lost, these short poems can have a lot of depth in skilled hands.

Nick Virgilio, am American haiku poet from Camden, N.J., worked magic with haiku. He published his first haiku in 1963 and continued his career by exploring beyond the limitations of the classic Japanese 5-7-5 syllable pattern. His style is reminiscent of imagists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams who were in vogue just a few decades earlier. His poems capture the essence of everyday America in moments of happiness, sorrow and melancholy.

Nick Virgilio at his typewriter

Haiku is a difficult poetic form to define because even Japanese masters held different definitions. But what seems to be universal is that haiku are moments captured in words that are meant to evoke emotion. In a National Public Radio interview from 1988, Virgilio said that the essence of haiku is “emotion expressed on a sensory level.”

Nick Virgilio Diner Haiga by Rick Black

The other essential element of haiku is the connection between human nature and nature itself. Virgilio plays a lot with this connection in his poetry because he believed that “it is the linking of human nature to all nature, this illumination of our being through a simple experience expressed in simple images that endow haiku poetry with unique depth and meaning.”

One of his more famous haiku is an excellent example of this:

deep in rank grass,

through a bullet-riddled helmet:

an unknown flower

Virgilio dedicated this poem to his youngest brother, Larry, who was killed in the Vietnam war. He shows how connected humans are, or rather should be, to nature by presenting an image of life coming out of death. There are no similes and no illusions—just a moment frozen in time meant to arouse an emotion within the reader.

But what makes Virgilio’s work resonate with a modern audience today? All the great writers in history are remembered because their writing transcends time. Virgilio’s poems do just that, too. They are rooted in physical objects and things that he links together to evoke emotion. Reading his poems is like looking at old photographs: they may have been taken years ago, but the feeling that they create remains just as powerful.

Nick Virgilio Lily Haiga by Rick Black

Haiku as a form is particularly relevant in the twenty-first century. In our times, we consume information in small doses. That is all we have time for in our fast-paced lives. Rather than seeing this as a drawback, modern poets have adapted to this development. For example, poets like Kaveh Akbar, an Iranian American poet, share their poems on Twitter in 280 characters or less to make people stop and think.

With its brevity and focus on the moment, haiku is the perfect poetic form for a modern-day audience because it can say a lot while only saying a little.


Emma Rawley, a senior at American University, is working as an intern at Turtle Light Press this summer.