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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 [2] 1973, as well as the | by Conrad Aiken. He is known to have introduced the "reversed consonance rime scheme" in writing poetry, as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks²especially commas, which made him known as the . He used the penname (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 , a poem dedicated to Villa.
èarly 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 ü by Sherwood Anderson.
üriting 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 D , 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 D ! . 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 , 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
" in 1933, Villa switched from writing prose to poetry, and published only a handful of works until 1942. During the release of # # 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 $ , 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.
Ñeath n 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 n 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.
¦ersonal 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.
ü % As an editor, Villa first published
& '( )*+', 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
- by editor Paz Márquez-Benítez in 1927. His first collection of short stories that he has written were published under the title
" &$ )
in 1933; while in 1939, Villa published D , his first collection poems, followed by in 1941. ther collections of poems include # # (1942), $ (1949), and ! (1958). In 1962, Villa published four books namely . ((, )- , , and $ . It was also in that year when he edited $
% )
/ ) *+*0. Three years later, he released a follow-up for $ entitled $ / .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 , which was edited by Jessica Hagedorn Several reprints of Villa's past works were done, including
& ) - in 1979, )|)) (a collection of Villa's poems for young readers, with Tagalog language Tagalog translation provided by Larry Francia), and $ & ü that was edited by Eileen Tabios with a foreword provided by Hagedorn (both in 1999). Among his popular poems include ü ü ! $# , an example of his "comma poems", and $/ . ! (a part of # #) which is basically a blank sheet of paper.'When I Was No Bigger Than A Huge
ü Villa described his use of commas after every word as similar to "Seurat's architectonic and measured pointillism²where 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 1**2:
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Villa also created verses out of already-published proses and forming what he liked to call "Collages". This excerpt from his poem 1'0(was adapted from - )3D3 % *:
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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".
Villa was granted a | 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.
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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 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 ü & ) ) 4 $ 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.
