About Us

The Camden Online Poetry Project (COPP) brings together three electronic publications: The Painted Bride Quarterly, The Mickle Street Review, and the Nick Virgilio Haiku Archive. The mission of the COPP is to provide students in higher education with experience in the electronic publication of literary materials and to assist public and private bodies in reinvigorating the cultural life of the city of Camden.

The Painted Bride Quarterly (PBQ), which has appeared continuously since 1973, is one of the oldest independently published journals of its kind. PBQ's 63-68 are available online; the first annual print anthology is now available on our site. PBQ's recent affiliation with Rutgers-Camden has re-energized the journal while creating new cultural opportunities for Camden and new pedagogical possibilities for the students and faculty in the creative writing program at Rutgers.

The Mickle Street Review (MSR), a journal formerly based in Walt Whitman's home on Mickle Street in Camden, has recently resumed publication as on online journal devoted to American Studies, with a particular interest in Whitman and American poetry. Its first issue, published in Spring 2001, focused on the connections between a poet and the place that he/she inhabits, drawing on the knowledge and experience of the curators of regional and historical societies and historic sites to show how such places may help the public to interpret the poet's work.

The Nick Virgilio Haiku Archive features the work of Camden's other major poet, Nick Virgilio, who died in 1990. Virgilio is regarded among readers of haiku as a master craftsman who helped to transform the Japanese form into an American idiom. His unpublished manuscripts, including some 24,000 haiku poems, have been lent to Rutgers by his brother and executor, Tony Virgilio, to be edited for publication. In cooperation with the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association, the English Department is currently constructing a website that will make this entire corpus of work accessible to students, poets, researchers, and general readers interested in haiku poetry.