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).”
—“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).
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| Jose Garcia Villa |
Public domain photo, cropped
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