José García Villa (August 5, 1908 – February 7, 1997) was a Filipino poet, literary critic, short story writer, and painter. He was awarded the National Artist of the Philippines title for literature in 1973, as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing by Conrad Aiken. He is known to have introduced the "reversed consonance rhyme scheme" in writing poetry, as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks—especially commas, which made him known as the Comma Poet. He used the pen name Doveglion (derived from "Dove, Eagle, Lion"), based on the characters he derived from his own works. These animals were also explored by another poet, E. E. Cummings, in "Doveglion, Adventures in Value", a poem dedicated to Villa.

He enrolled at the University of New Mexico, wherein he was one of the founders of Clay, a mimeograph literary magazine. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and pursued post-graduate work at Columbia University. Villa had gradually caught the attention of the country's literary circles, one of the few Asians to do so at that time.

After the publication of Footnote to Youth in 1933, Villa switched from writing prose to poetry, and published only a handful of works until 1942. During the release of Have Come, Am Here in 1942, he introduced a new rhyming scheme called "reversed consonance" wherein, according to Villa: "The last sounded consonants of the last syllable, or the last principal consonant of a word, are reversed for the corresponding rhyme. Thus, a rhyme for near would be run; or rain, green, reign."

In 1949, Villa presented a poetic style he called "comma poems", wherein commas are placed after every word. In the preface of Volume Two, he wrote: "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."

Villa worked as an associate editor for New Directions Publishing in New York City from 1949 to 1951, and then became director of poetry workshop at City College of New York from 1952 to 1960. He then left the literary scene and concentrated on teaching, first lecturing in The New School for Social Research from 1964 to 1973, as well as conducting poetry workshops in his apartment. Villa was also a cultural attaché to the Philippine Mission to the United Nations from 1952 to 1963, and an adviser on cultural affairs to the President of the Philippines beginning 1968.

Death

On February 5, 1997, at the age of 88, José was found unconscious in his New York apartment and was rushed to St. Vincent Hospital in the Greenwich Village area. His death two days later, February 7, was attributed to "cerebral stroke and multilobar pneumonia". He was buried on February 10 in St. John's Cemetery in New York, wearing a barong tagalog.

New York Centennial Celebration

On August 5 and 6, 2008, Villa's centennial celebration began with a poem reading at the Jefferson Market Library. For the launch of Doveglion: Collected Poems, Penguin Classics’ reissue of Villa's poems edited by John Edwin Cowen, there were readings of his poems by Cowen, by book introducer Luis H. Francia, and by scholar Tina Chang. Then, the Leonard Lopate Show interviewed Cowen and Francia on the "Pope of Greenwich Village's" life and work, followed by the Asia Pacific Forum show.

Personal life

In 1946 Villa married Rosemarie Lamb, with whom he had two sons, Randall and Lance. They annulled their marriage ten years later. He also had three grandchildren,

Jordan Villa, Sara Villa Stokes and Travis Villa. Villa was especially close to his nieces, Ruby Precilla, Milagros Villanueva, Maria Luisa Cohen, and Maria Villanueva.

Works

As an editor, Villa first published Philippine Short Stories: Best 25 Short Stories of 1928 in 1929, an anthology of Filipino short stories written in English that were mostly published in the literary magazine Philippine Free Press for that year. It is the second anthology to have been published in the Philippines, after Philippine Love Stories by editor Paz Márquez-Benítez in 1927. His first collection of short stories that he had written were published under the title Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others in 1933; while in 1939, Villa published Many Voices, his first collection poems, followed by Poems by Doveglion in 1941. Other collections of poems include Have Come, Am Here (1942) and Volume Two (1949; the year he edited The Doveglion Book of Philippine Poetry in English from 1910). Three years later, he released a follow-up for The Portable Villa entitled The Essential Villa. In 1958 he brought out Selected Poems and New, in which he retained "only those poems that I can still care about" from Have Come, Am Here and Volume Two. There was, in addition, a section of early poems, "comprising what I deem to be the best of the work done in my early youth," published for the first time. With this volume "Villa abandoned poetry" (Cowen). Villa, however, went under "self-exile" after the 1960s, even though he was nominated for several major literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This was perhaps because of oppositions between his formalism (literature) formalist style and the advocates of proletarian literature, who misjudged him as a petty bourgeois. Villa only "resurfaced" in 1993 with an anthology entitled Charlie Chan Is Dead, which was edited by Jessica Hagedorn.

Several reprints of Villa's past works were done, including Appassionata: Poems in Praise of Love in 1979, A Parliament of Giraffes (a collection of Villa's poems for young readers, with Tagalog language Tagalog translation provided by Larry Francia), and The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Villa that was edited by Eileen Tabios with a foreword provided by Hagedorn (both in 1999).

His popular poems include When I Was No Bigger Than A Huge, an example of his "comma poems", and The Emperor's New Sonnet (a part of Have Come, Am Here) which is basically a blank sheet of paper.

Writing style

Villa described his use of commas after every word as similar to "Seurat's architectonic and measured pointillism—where the points of color are themselves the medium as well as the technique of statement". This unusual style forces the reader to pause after every word, slowing the pace of the poem and resulting in what Villa calls "a lineal pace of dignity and movement". An example of Villa's "comma poems" can be found in an excerpt of his work #114:

Villa also created verses out of already-published proses and forming what he liked to call "Collages". This excerpt from his poem #205 was adapted from Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, volume 1:

While Villa agreed with William Carlos Williams that "prose can be a laboratory for metrics", he tried to make the adapted words his own. His opinion on what makes a good poetry was in contrast to the progressive style of Walt Whitman, concerning which he said: "Poetry should evoke an emotional response. The poet has a breathlessness in him that he converts into a breathlessness of words, which in turn becomes the breathlessness of the reader. This is the sign of a true poet. All other verse, without this appeal, is just verse."

In a review to Footnote to Youth, The New York Times wrote, "For at least two years the name of José Garcia Villa has been familiar to the devotees of the experimental short story... They knew, too, that he was an extremely youthful Filipino who had somehow acquired the ability to write a remarkable English prose and who had come to America as a student in the summer of 1930." This comment brought out two opposing impressions of him: as a literary genius, and merely as a writer of English as a second language. In his introduction to Footnote to Youth, American writer Edward J. O'Brien—who dedicated his collection Best American Short Stories of 1932 to Villa—hailed the poet as "one of a half-dozen American short-story writers who count". Meanwhile, in reaction to Villa's poems, e.e. cummings wrote, "and i am alive to see a man against the sky".

Critics were divided about Villa's "comma poems". On one side, they were irritated by them, calling them "gimmicky". In 1966, Leonard Casper wrote in New Writings from the Philippines that the technique of putting commas after every word "is as demonstrably malfunctional as a dragging foot". Ten years later, Casper continued to criticize Villa because he "still uses the 'commas' with inadequate understanding and skill". On the other hand, Sitwell wrote in The American Genius magazine that the comma poem "springs with a wild force, straight from the poet's being, from his blood, from his spirit, as a fire breaks from wood, or as a flower grows from its soil".

Publications

Poetry collections

  • Many Voices (Philippine Book Guild, 1939)
  • Poems by Doveglion (The Philippine Writers' League, 1941)
  • Have Come, Am Here (Viking Press, 1942); finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1943)
  • Volume Two (New Directions, 1949)
  • Selected Poems and New (McDowell Obolensky, 1958)
  • Poems 55 (A. S. Florentino, 1962)
  • Appassionata: Poems in Praise of Love (King and Cowen, 1979)

Short stories

  • Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933)

Anthologies

  • Philippine Short Stories: Best 25 Short Stories of 1928 (Philippines Free Press, 1929)

Editions

  • A Celebration for Edith Sitwell (New Directions, 1948)

Anthologies

  • Poems in praise of love : the best love poems of Jose Garcia Villa. A.S. Florentino: National Book Store, 1973,
  • (E. Tabios, Ed.) The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings. New York: Kaya. 1999.
  • (J. Chua, Ed.) The Critical Villa: Essays in Literary Criticism, Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press. 2002.
  • (J. E. Cowen, Ed. & L. H. Francia, Intro.) Doveglion: Collected Poems. London: Penguin Classics. 2008.

Awards and honors

Villa was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Writing by American writer Conrad Aiken, wherein he was also awarded a $1,000 prize for "outstanding work in American literature", as well as a fellowship from Bollingen Foundation. Villa also won first prize in the Poetry Category of UP Golden Jubilee Literary Contests in 1958, as well as the Pro Patria Award for literature in 1961, and the Heritage Award for poetry and short stories a year later. He was conferred with a honoris causa doctorate degree for literature by Far Eastern University in Manila on 1959 (and later by University of the Philippines), and the National Artist Award for Literature in 1973. In 1973 and 1974, he was nominated by Purita Kalaw Ledesma, founder of the Art Association of the Philippines. Though nominated for the prize, the Nobel Library of the Swedish Academy only owns two of his poetry collections, Selected Poems and New and Poems 55, used for deliberations.

See also

  • List of Filipino Nobel laureates and nominees

References

Further reading

  • 'I Revolve a Skull that Knows: On José García Villa', Cordite Poetry Review 2014
  • Analysis of Footnote to Youth on Lit React