By Ron Avery -- Daily News Staff Writer
Philadelphia Daily News
Thursday, January 5, 1989
He was obviously an original, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt, standing on his head in the middle of the Camden City Hall press room, demonstrating his mastery of yoga and talking non-stop.
Nick Virgilio was certainly a bona fide eccentric. The question was: Is this likable oddball a bona fide poet, as he claimed.
Real poets, everyone knows, are sensitive, quiet, intellectual, introspective. They smoke pipes, wear leather patches on their jacket sleeves, and teach English at small but prestigious liberal arts colleges.
How could this jobless, loud, zany character – practically a street person - be a real poet. Sure, Cornbread, Cool Earl, and Barry Manilow are also poets, of a sort.
This reporter had been around too long to be sucked in by a loveable, but oh-so-obvious publicity-seeker. I’d write a story about a colorful character; the guy was good copy. But I wasn’t going to palm him off as a real poet.
Just for the heck of it, I’d check first with the real poets.
Even crusty, all-knowing reporters can be wrong. My notes are gone, but I clearly remember the poetry editor from Doubleday Books using the words “pioneer,” “a source” and “among the best” to describe Nick Virgilio’s haiku poetry.
The guy said he remembered many years back sitting with the poets and professors in a place with a name like “Writers House” in Manhattan discussing Virgilio’s poems.
This was startling: the guys with pipes and patches seriously pondering the words of a blabber-mouthed guy from Camden who looked like Soupy Sales and had nothing better to do than ride buses to South Philly every day to buy fruit and vegetables on 9th Street.
I called several other haiku-reading eggheads all knew and admired Nick Virgilio.
We became friends, which meant Nick had a new subject to vent his passions upon. I had a vague interest; Nick beat my ear daily about the joys of yoga. There was illness in my family; Nick practically begged on bended that knee that I try ginseng root.
I was inundated with scores of new poems, idea, fragments. Did I like it? What do you think? He craved reaction.
I moved from the Camden to the Philadelphia office about a year ago. Every month or two, I’d say to my self, “You’ve got to call Nick.”
Friday night, Nick called me. He was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning.
Nick rarely made more than five bucks for a published poem, and that was OK. He was, perhaps, America’s last true non-materialist. It was recognition he craved – craved it openly and honestly, like a child.
And now at age 60, he was getting it. His second book was out. He was about to be interviewed on National Public Radio. But this was the Biggie. Nick was going to be interviewed on CBS’s “Nightwatch.” National Television!
A mutual friend called Tuesday, “I’ve got bad news. Nick Virgilio died. It happened during the taping of ‘Nightwatch’.”
A Catholic priest, the Rev. Michael Doyle of Camden, was probably Nick’s closest friend. “He’s been very sick with congestive heart problems. Another man would have been in a wheel chair,” said Doyle. “But I think this was the best way for him to die – squeezing the last ounce out of life, trying intensely to communicate with the world.”