On Sunday, May 19, 2019, Rick Black will be giving an artist talk, “The Amichai Windows”: A Morning of Poetry and Art” at the Highland Park Conservative Synagogue in Highland Park, NJ. To date, The Amichai Windows is in several major collections, including Yale University Library, the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress…
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.
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ARLINGTON, VA — We are very glad to announce that Yale University Library has purchased the first copy of our limited edition artist book, The Amichai Windows. “The work is quite stunning and we are delighted to add it to our Yale Library collection,” said Nanette Stahl, the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Librarian for Judaic…
ARLINGTON, VA—Turtle Light Press is proud to announce that Chad Lee Robinson’s The Deep End of the Sky has won a 2016 Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award. Robinson’s book, which won the Turtle Light Press 2014 Haiku Chapbook Contest, took second place among all haiku books published in 2015. “I am more than…
A standing-room-only crowd of about 40 people turned out for our recent screening of the Sean Dougherty film, remembering Nick Virgilio at the Big Blue Marble bookstore in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. The audience, many of whom are members of the local Mad Poets Society branch, started trickling in around 7 p.m. from…
I’m excited to let folks know about some new fine art prints that TLP now has to offer. On numerous trips to Camden, N.J., to work on the new Turtle Light Press book, Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, I snapped photos of the area and now have turned them into digital paintings, each one…
As Osip Mandelstam said, “great poetry is often a response to total disaster.” This morning, my daughter arose early at 5:30 a.m. because she incorrectly set her alarm clock. Instead of going back to bed, she tiptoed downstairs to read the fifth book of Harry Potter. I decided to get up myself, shave and read…
You won’t want to miss it! Please join us for a screening of the poignant documentary remembering Nick Virgilio… by Sean Dougherty at 2 p.m. on Sunday, October 7 at Robin’s Bookstore/Moonstone Arts Gallery in Philadelphia. We will have a special reading of sections of the new Virgilio book, Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku,…
Watching the riots at the American consulate in Libya brings back memories of when I was caught in similar circumstances during my reporting experiences in Israel. That was already 20 years ago but the visceral memory of being amid a mob bent on killing has stayed with me. It was during the first Palestinian intifada…
Just this week a terrific feature came out about Nick Virgilio in A Hundred Gourds by Kathleen O’Toole in which she discusses the forces that led Virgilio to haiku as well as his influence upon the haiku community and our perception of haiku today. Here are some short excerpts: “When Nick Virgilio discovered a copy…