COMMA
POEMS—A MODERNIST IDIOM
Jose Garcia
Villa (1908-1997) is a luminary poet of the Philippines. He is acknowledged as
a notable man of letters both in his country, where he retained his citizenship
throughout his life, as well as in the United States, where he chose to live
and work for 67 years. He was honored as a National Artist of the Philippines
for Literature in 1973, among numerous other awards, honors, and grants.
Villa has been
featured in noteworthy publications.
Together with
Jose Rizal and Nick Joaquin, he was one of only three Filipino poets included
in World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time (1998),
edited by Katharine Washburn, John S. Major, and Clifton Fadiman. Encompassing
4,000 years of poetry until the late 20th century, the anthology compiles in
one volume over 1,600 poems originating from various languages and cultures
around the world.
In 2008 Penguin
Classics published Doveglion: Collected Poems, Villa’s complete poems, edited
by John Edwin Cowen and with an introduction by Luis H. Francia.
The website of
the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) of the Republic of the Philippines
says the following about the National Artist:
“Jose Garcia
Villa is considered as one of the finest contemporary poets regardless of race
or language. Villa, who lived in Singalong, Manila, introduced the reversed
consonance rime scheme, including the comma poems that made full use of the
punctuation mark in an innovative, poetic way. The first of his poems ‘Have
Come, Am Here’ received critical recognition when it appeared in New York in
1942 that, soon enough, honors and fellowships were heaped on him: Guggenheim,
Bollingen, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards. He used Doveglion
(Dove, Eagle, Lion) as pen name, the very characters he attributed to himself,
and the same ones explored by e. e. cummings in the poem he wrote for Villa
(Doveglion, Adventures in Value).”
https://ncca.gov.ph/about-culture-and-arts/culture-profile/national-artists-of-the-philippines/jose-garcia-villa/
—“Order of National Artists: Jose Garcia Villa,” National Commission for Culture and the Arts
The Academy of
American Poets website acknowledges Villa’s significance in Anglo-American literature.
Besides citing his honors and awards, the Academy observes:
“[In New York
City Villa] became the only Asian poet in a community that also consisted of E.
E. Cummings, W. H. Auden, and other modernist poets. In 1933 his Footnote to
Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (Charles Scribner’s Sons) became
the first book of fiction by a Filipino author published by a major United
States-based press.
“Villa also
continued to publish in the Philippines, and his poetry collections Many
Voices (Philippine Book Guild) and Poems (The Philippine Writers’
League) appeared in 1939 and 1941, respectively. In 1942 he published his first
poetry collection in the United States, Have Come, Am Here (Viking
Press), which was a finalist for the 1943 Pulitzer Prize. He went on to publish
several more poetry collections in the Philippines, including Poems in
Praise of Love (A. S. Florentino, 1962), and two in the United States, Selected
Poems and New (McDowell Obolensky, 1958) and Volume Two (New
Directions, 1949).”
https://poets.org/poet/jose-garcia-villa
—“José Garcia Villa: 1908 – 1997,” Poets.org
U.S.-based Kaya
Press declares, revealingly:
“At the height
of his career, Villa’s writings earned him prizes, fellowships, and lavish
praise from some of the greatest literary luminaries of the day. Yet his work
has been out of the public eye for more than thirty years and out of print for
more than fifteen. Although named a National Artist in the Philippines where he
was born, Villa remains largely unknown in the United States today.
“Kaya’s
republication of Villa’s writings both recovers and rediscovers the work of
this fierce iconoclast for a new generation. Included are reprints of his major
poems and representatives from each of his significant experiments, as well as
short stories and non-fiction work.”
https://kaya.com/authors/jose-garcia-villa-jose-garcia-villa-jose-garcia-villa/
—“KAYA PUBLISHES BOOKS OF THE ASIAN PACIFIC DIASPORA: José Garcia Villa,”
Kaya Press
Kaya Press refers
to Villa’s republished writings in The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings
(1999), edited by Eileen Tabios and with a foreword by Jessica Hagedorn.
Villa’s career coincided
with the rise of modernism, which robustly developed at the beginning of the
twentieth century and throughout the 1930s. Modernism definitively declined in
the late 1960s when it segued into postmodernism. In the literary arts of the
West, modernism concluded earlier than in the other arts, declining in the 1940s
and 1950s.
It would appear
that Villa, who is best understood as a modernist Filipino poet writing in
English, rode the cultural wave of modernism in the West, so that his public profile
diminished when modernism in literature, itself waned.
In May 1949
Villa published a group of seven poems, which he called “comma poems,” in Horizon
magazine wherein he introduced a poetic innovation by inserting commas between
each and every word in the poem.
In “A Note on
the Poems,” he explains:
“The reader of the
following poems may be perplexed and puzzled at my use of the comma: it is a
new, special and poetic use to which I have put it. The commas appear in
the poems functionally, and thus not for eccentricity; and they are
there also poetically, that is to say, not in their prose function.
These poems were conceived with commas, as ‘comma poems’, in which the
commas are an integral and essential part of the medium: regulating the poem’s
verbal density and time movement: enabling each word to attain a fuller tonal
value, and the line movement to become more measured.
“…I realize of
course that this poetic employment of the comma is an innovation which may
disconcert some readers.”
In the context
of modernism as a cultural movement, this particular innovation of Villa may be
interpreted as a historical iconoclastic repudiation of poetic convention.
Villa’s
innovation has not always been well-received. At its best, it is an attribute
that augments the artist’s intended poetic effect. At its worst, it is pretentious
and farcical, falling flat.
Thomas Dorsett,
Villa’s astute critic and onetime student (1967-72), said of Villa’s comma
poems:
“José does use
the comma as a virtuoso, sometimes to great effect, but the eye sometimes
fatigues from all those commas. In the best examples, the commas significantly increase
the wonder of the poem; in the worst, this new use of commas seems rather too
clever and precious.”
—Thomas Dorsett,
“The Poetry of José Garcia Villa,” Spring: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings
Society (2007), Volume 16, Article 17, page 174
In at least two published poems I used some adaptation of Villa’s “comma poem” innovation:
“Jeepneys: To Vicente
Manansala”
https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2016/08/normal-0-false-false-false-en-ph-x-none.html
“Unique Forms
of Continuity in Space by Umberto Boccioni”
https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2023/09/unique-forms-of-continuity-in-space-by.html
I resorted to Villa’s
eccentric technique for at least three reasons.
First, my poems
are both written as ekphrases of modernist artworks. In seeking a suitable idiom
for the ekphrases, I sought the same modernist character that defined the
artworks. Because the “comma poem” format is a modernist idiom, I found it
suitable.
Second, the “comma
poem” format imparts an abstract, stop-start quality to the poem. In a comma
poem, written or spoken language is broken up by the commas and then reconstituted
to give rise to newfound, unconventional meanings. A comma poem does not communicate
in a conventional way. It generates unexpected, eccentric meanings.
In addition, the
process of breaking up conventional, often realist visual construction and afterwards
reconstituting it belongs to the process of abstraction in the visual arts, so
that the comma poem recapitulates this process.
The stop-start
character of the comma poem also recapitulates analogous abstract elements in
the visual artwork. “Jeepneys: To Vicente Manansala” does so, for example, when
the poem repeats, analogically, as it were, the stop-start quality of Manansala’s
energetic brushstrokes.
Not as felicitous
in recapitulating visual abstraction is “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space by
Umberto Boccioni” (the poem), because Boccioni’s masterpiece is characterized by
smoothly flowing contours, not so much by abrupt interruptions.
On the other
hand, Boccioni’s sculpture demonstrates a stop-start character when, for example,
the strapping figure’s surface sharply wicks away.
The stop-start quality of the verses also recapitulates the stop-start quality
of stream-of-consciousness, which is modernist.
A final reason
why I resorted to Villa’s eccentric innovation in my poetry is to simply honor
him. Not only do I recognize that literary excellence abounds everywhere, I am willing
to acknowledge it. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (popularly
attributed to Oscar Wilde).
