Jose Garcia Villa

Jose Garcia 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.[2] He is known to have
introduced the "reversed consonance rime 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
penname Doveglion (derived from "Dove, Eagle, Lion"), based on the characters he derived from himself.
These animals were also explored by another poet e.e. cummings in Doveglion, Adventures in Value, a
poem dedicated to Villa.

Biography
Early life

Villa was born on August 5, 1908, in Manila's Singalong district. His parents were Simeon Villa (a
personal physician of Emilio Aguinaldo, the founding President of the First Philippine Republic) and Guia
Garcia (a wealthy landowner).He graduated from University of the Philippines Integrated
School|University of the Philippines High School in 1925. Villa enrolled on a pre Medical school medicine
course in University of the Philippines UP, but then switched to pre Law school|law. However, he realized
that his true passion was in the arts. Villa first tried painting, but then turned into Creative writing after
reading Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.
Writing career

Villa was considered the leader of Filipino "artsakists", a group of writers who believe that art
should be "for art's sake" hence the term. He once pronounced that "art is never a means; it is an end in
itself."Jose Garcia Villa - Finest Filipino Poet in English.Villa's tart poetic style was considered too
aggressive at that time. In 1929 he published Man Songs, a series of erotic poems, which the
administrators in UP found too bold and was even fined Philippine peso for obscenity by the Manila Court
of First Instance. In that same year, Villa won Best Story of the Year from Philippine Free Press magazine
for Mir-I-Nisa. He also received P1,000,000 prize money, which he used to migrate for the United States.

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 measures."

Villa worked as an associate editor for New Directions Publishing in New York City between 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|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, Jose was found on a coma in his New York apartment and
was rushed to St. Vincent Hospital in the Greenwich area. His death two days later 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 poem reading at the Jefferson
Market Library, at 425 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) at the corner of 10th St. In the launch of
Doveglion, Collected Poems, Penguin Classics’ reissue of Jose Garcia Villa's poems, edited by John
Edwin Cowen, Villa's literary trustee, will be read by book introducer Luis H. Francia. Then, the Leonard
Lopate Show (on WNYC AM 820 and FM 93.9) will interview Edwin Cohen and Luis H. Francia on the
"Pope of Greenwich Villages" life and work, followed by the Asia Pacific Forum show.
Personal

In 1946 Villa married Rosemarie Lamb, with whom he has two sons, Randy and Lance. They
divorced ten years later. He also has three grandchildren.

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 literature 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 has written were published under the title Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines
and Othersin 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), Volume Two (1949), and Selected Poems and New (1958).

In 1962, Villa published four books namely Villa's Poems 55, Poems in Praise of Love, Selected
Stories, and The Portable Villa. It was also in that year when 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.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 Appasionata: 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).

Among 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.'When I Was No Bigger Than A Huge
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
resulting to 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:

In, my, undream, of, death,

“
I, unspoke, the, Word.
Since, nobody, had, dared,
With, my, own, breath,
I, broke, the, cord! ”
Villa also created verses out of already-published proses and forming what he liked to call "Collages".
This excerpt from his poem #205was adapted from Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, volume 1:

And then suddenly,

“
A life on which one could
Stand. Now it carried one and
Was conscious of one while it

Carried. A stillness in which

Reality and miracle

Had become identical -

Stillness of that greatest
Stillness. Like a plant that is to
Become a tree, so was I
Taken out of the little container,
Carefully, while earth ”
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 styles of Walt Whitman, 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.

He also advised his students who aspire to become poets not to read any form of fiction in order
for their poems "(not become) contaminated by narrative elements", insisting that real poetry is "written
with words, not ideas".

Awards
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.[4] He was also bestowed an Academy Award for Literature
from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1943. 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 Universityin Manila on 1959 (and later by University
of the Philippines), and the National Artist Award for Literature in 1973.

He was one of three Filipinos, along with novelist Jose Rizal and translator Nick Joaquin, included
in World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time published in 2000, which featured over
1,600 poems written by hundreds of poets in different languages and culture within a span of 40 centuries
dating from the development of early writing in ancient Sumer and Egypt.