Nick Virgilio’s unpublished haiku number in the tens of thousands. As our work with the archive continues, we will be scanning Virgilio’s papers to make them available to the public as well as the academic community. As is indicated in the poet’s notes, letters and marginalia, he clearly wished to preserve this work.
Virgilio left behind approximately 15,000 pages of work. Most of it is repeated drafts of evolving haiku, typed in two columns on the reverse side of stationery. The poet evidently collected unused paper from businesses in the Camden and Philadelphia region. Because almost none of these pages are dated, the materials have been arranged into series according to stationery type. Each series is sorted into boxes containing 30 folders each; each folder contains 25 pages.
The following are folders that have been imaged so far. Currently, the online archive consists of about 200 pages of high-resolution color PDFs, 425 pages of black-and-white PDFs, and about 500 pages that were photographed. We hope to have high-quality color PDFs of most of the archive by late 2016.