INTRODUCTION:

TITLE: Analysis on Jose Garcia Villa’s Punctuation as Poetic Device

Although José Garcia Villa (1914–1997) is largely known as a Filipino poet, he spent 67 years of his life
in the United States. His work has been praised as innovative and talented. A contributor to the Dictionary
of Oriental Literature observed of Villa that "His craftsmanship and skill remains unchallenged among
Filipino poets."
Born in Manila, Philippines, on August 5, 1914, Villa was the son of Simeon Villa, a doctor who was
Army chief-of-staff during the Philippine revolution against Spain, as well as personal physician to
revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo; his mother was Guia Garcia, a wealthy landowner. Villa attended
the University of the Philippines in 1929. He first studied medicine, and then switched to law, but he was
always interested in writing, and as a law student he wrote short stories and poetry. Some of his writing,
notably a series of erotic verse titled "Man Poems," was so controversial that the authorities at the
University of the Philippines expelled him. In that same year, however, Villa won a prize from the
Philippines Free Press for the best short story of the year.
Villa moved to the United States in 1930, seeking a more congenial and liberal literary scene. Although
he remained a Philippine citizen, he spent the rest of his life in the United States, only rarely returning to
his home country. He enrolled in the University of New Mexico, earning a B.A. degree in 1933. While at
the University of New Mexico, he founded a literary magazine, titled Clay, which published the work of
several young American writers who later became famous. Villa attended Columbia University for
graduate study in 1942.
Villa began writing short stories while he was still an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico. He
published these and his poems in American literary magazines to almost immediate praise. He received
far more publicity than his seemingly obscure origins would bring, largely because of the work of critic
Edward J. O'Brien, who saw in Villa an incredible talent. In 1932 O'Brien dedicated his edited collection
Best American Short Stories of 1932 to Villa. Villa also won the Shelley Memorial and Rockefeller
awards, received a Guggenheim fellowship for writing, and was given membership in the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. Although he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, he did not win, as his work
was considered too experimental.
O'Brien was so successful at bringing literary attention to Villa that when a collection of Villa's stories,
Footnote to Youth, was published in 1933, a reviewer in the New York Times was already familiar with
Villa's life and reputation. According to Timothy Yu in an article on the Meritage Press Web site, the
New York Times reviewer wrote that "For at least two years the name of Jose 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 points out two streams of
commentary on Villa's work that would persist throughout his career: some critics saw him simply as a
genius, while others focused on his identity as a speaker, and writer, of English as a second language.
This second group of reviewers often seemed surprised that a Filipino could learn to write so well in
English, revealing their own prejudices.
After publishing Footnote, Villa abandoned short-story writing and turned all his attention to poetry.
Between 1933 and 1942 he published very little. Yu speculated that he made the switch from short stories
to poetry because most fiction writers are judged by their presentation of the cultures and social settings
they are familiar with in their own lives. If Villa had continued to write fiction, he would have been
constrained by these expectations to write about the Philippines and, as Yu wrote, "Any attempt by Villa
to present 'American' content would likely … have been dismissed out of hand. By turning to poetry, he
was able to turn his foreignness into an asset, a brand of exoticism that appealed to the orientalist strain in
American modernism while still allowing Villa to take his place among the 'great' American writers." Yu
noted that another critic, Salvador P. Lopez, had a simpler explanation for Villa's switch from one genre
to another: "He is simply a better poet than he is a prose writer." Lopez also implied that "There is simply
less competition in the field of poetry, as there may be fewer accomplished Filipino poets writing in
English."
In 1942 Villa's first book of poetry to be published in the United States was released. Have Come, Am
Here introduces a new rhyming scheme, which Villa called "reversed consonance." Babette Deutsch
wrote in the New Republic that the collection reveals Villa's concern for "ultimate things, the self and the
universe. He is also on visiting terms with the world. He is more interested in himself than in the
universe, and he greets the world with but a decent urbanity." She noted that, although his range is
somewhat narrow, Villa "soars high and plunges deep." British poet Edith Sitwell wrote in her preface to
Villa's later book, Selected Poems and New, that when she read Have Come, Am Here she experienced "a
shock." She described one poem in the collection, "Number 57," as "a strange poem of ineffable beauty,
springing straight from the depths of Being. I hold that this is one of the most wonderful short poems of
our time, and reading it I knew that I was seeing for the first time the work of a poet with a great, even an
astonishing, and perfectly original gift."
In his Volume Two, Villa presents a second form of his devise, which he dubs "comma poems." He
writes in the preface to the collection, "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." In these poems, Villa inserts a comma after nearly
every word. Some critics were irritated by this technique, viewing it as a gimmick. Leonard Casper wrote
in New Writings from the Philippines that Villa's use of commas "is as demonstrably malfunctional as a
dragging foot" and that ten years later, Villa "still uses the 'commas' with inadequate understanding and
skill."

However, Villa's structural approach had many supporters, including Sitwell, who wrote in The American
Genius, "This poetry 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." Villa's work was also praised by
other well-regarded poets, including Marianne Moore, Mark van Doren, Horace Gregory, and Richard
Eberhart.
In 1946 Villa married Rosemarie Lamb; they had two sons, Randall and Lance, before divorcing ten years
later. He worked as an associate editor at New Directions Publishing in New York from 1949 to 1951 and
was director of the poetry workshop at City College of the City University of New York from 1952 to
1960; from 1964 to 1973, he lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Villa also
served as cultural attaché to the Philippine Mission to the United Nations from 1952 to 1963, and
beginning in 1968, he was advisor on cultural affairs to the president of the Philippines.
"The Anchored Angel," first published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1957, serves as the
foundation of a collection of about 80 of Villa's "comma poems" published in 2000 as The Anchored
Angel: Selected Writings of José Garcia Villa. The poem considers the theme of man wrestling with the
divine, a recurring interest of Villa's. The commas following each word in the work are intended to
"anchor" the reader and focus attention on each word in an almost meditative way. According to Luis
Francia in Asia Week online, this poem was hailed as Villa's "greatest work."

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM:

1. How is punctuation as poetic device used in the poems of Jose Garcia Villa?
2. How does punctuation as a poetic device used by Jose Garcia Villa help reflect the themes of his
poems?
METHODOLOGY:
Content Analysis
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION:
When I Was No Bigger Than A Huge: This poem is deliberated as a comma poem which they consider
as very similar to pointillism in painting. The excessive punctuation in the text may add sensationalism
and artistry into it. This bizarre style pushes the reader to pause after every word which slows down the
pace and results to an unusual movement or rhythm of the poem. The speaker can be considered as a sick
old man reminiscing and feeling the remaining moments of his life because of the slow pace of the poem.
Villa used other punctuations such as hyphen in “Wrath-Ful”; colon in “Tiger:”; exclamation point in
“Creator!” to add strong emotion to the poem. Moreover, at the end of the poem Villa used a dot in
“Grow.” to signify the ending of the poem.
Fragment:
Lyric 22:
CONCLUSION:
His use of comma and other punctuations after every word consisting each line gives emphasis and
significance towards the meanings which they provide. The lines composed of only one to three words
create the illusion of stanzas or transitions from one idea to another.
REFERENCES:
Fatalla, V. A. P. B. J. M. (2020, November 20). When I Was No Bigger Than A Huge. ANTROLOHIYA.
https://antrolohiya.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/when-i-was-no-bigger-than-a-huge/
Paper: When,I,was,no,bigger,than,a,huge. (2009, December 8). Midnight Equinox.
https://unequivocalhorizon.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/paper-wheniwasnobiggerthanahuge/
When I Was No Bigger Than a Huge and First a Poem Must Be Magical by Jose Garcia Villa. (n.d.).
Scribd. https://www.scribd.com/document/360674394/When-I-Was-No-Bigger-Than-a-Huge-and-First-a-
Poem-Must-Be-Magical-by-Jose-Garcia-Villa
How techniques affect meaning: An analysis of Jose Garcia Villa’s Poems. (2013, July 15). Jooleeyuuh.
https://jooleeyuuh.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/how-techniques-affect-meaning-an-analysis-of-jose-garcia-
villas-poems/
jose garcia villa –. (n.d.). Da-da-da-de-da-da ♫. https://hiteach007.wordpress.com/tag/jose-garcia-villa/