In a photograph taken at the Gotham Book Mart on November 9, 1948, Edith and Osbert Sitwell are surrounded by many important writers of the time: W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell, to name a few. Among them is a writer who remains less well known today than many of his contemporaries: José Garcia Villa.
Villa was born in Manila, Philippines in 1908. He traveled to the United States in 1929, paying for his passage with prize money he won in a short-story competition at the University of the Philippines. In 1930, he attended the University of New Mexico where he started a literary magazine, Clay. Scribner’s published his short story collection in 1933, the first to be published by a Filipino in the United States. Viking Press published his first collection of poetry—Have Come, Am Here—in 1942. Villa settled in New York, taught at the New School, and held informal workshops in his apartment. He became known as “The Pope of Greenwich Village.”
Despite Villa’s undeniable presence in the American literary scene and Sitwell’s championing of him as one of “the world’s greatest contemporary poets,” Villa remains a largely neglected poet. Doveglion: Collected Poems by José Garcia Villa (Penguin Books, 2008), edited by John Edwin Cohen with an introduction by Luis H. Francia, marks an important moment for the resurgence of interest in Villa’s oeuvre—though, perhaps, less important than the publication of The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by José Garcia Villa (Kaya Press, 1999) edited by Eileen Tabios with an introduction by Jessica Hagedorn. While the Collected Poems is necessary for anyone interested in Villa’s work, the Selected Writings provides various essays on Villa’s life and work.
“Doveglion,” Villa’s pen name, combines “dove,” “eagle,” and “lion.” On the cover of the book, these three words overlay a chiaroscuro profile of Villa, which strangely resembles an anthropological portrait. In contrast, Luis H. Francia provides a much more human depiction of Villa in the introduction. Francia, Villa’s former student and fellow Filipino writer, describes the intensity of the Greenwich Village workshops along with the “bric-a-brac of uncommon variety” in Villa’s apartment. Overall, Francia creates a nostalgic and passionate portrait of Doveglion’s life and work.
One disappointing aspect of the introduction is Francia’s sparse discussion of modernist orientalism. Scholar and writer Timothy Yu argues in “José Garcia Villa and Modernist Orientalism,” that American critics situated Villa within the Anglo-American canon as a way to tame his difference and place him within a universal tradition (i.e. the Western canon). Dismissing Yu’s argument, Francia simply writes: “Indeed, critics remarked on [Villa’s] influences, his antecedents, from the Metaphysical poets to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Cummings” (xxvii). While Francia does quote Babette Deutsch’s infamous statement (“The fact that he is a native of the Philippines who came to the English language as a stranger may have helped him to his un-usual syntax”), he chalks her comment up to “plain ignorance” (xxviii). Interestingly, Francia heralds Marianne Moore and Edith Sitwell’s praise of Villa, but he forgets to mention that Moore once described Villa as a “Chinese master” and Sitwell once described him as a “magic iguana” and often referred to his green features. Francia asks: “Is there an orientalist subtext?” His uncritical answer: “Perhaps.” After reading various essays that Yu has written about Villa, it has become clear to me that orientalism was not a subtext to Villa’s reception but an undeniable context. Francia would have been better served to wrestle a bit more with the dark underbelly of modernism instead of sanitizing Villa’s reception.
On the other hand, Francia doesn’t sanitize his indictment of “the pantheon of Asian American literature.” He argues that Villa has been excluded from this pantheon because, unlike Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan, Villa avoided writing poetry about his Filipino culture, identity, or experience. According to Francia, “political correctness trumped literature” and thus Villa was “snubbed” by the early formations of Asian American literature. Francia attributes Villa’s somewhat recent inclusion in the Asian American canon to the work of contemporary Asian American poets who “write on topics that have nothing to do with their historical condition” and insist on their full rights as “citizens of the republic of poetry” (xxxvi). He claims Villa acted as a “pioneer” in that regard (an unfortunate word choice considering the role of U.S. pioneering in the Philippines).
The real treasure of Doveglion is its scope: the book includes all of Villa’s published collections, a suggested reading bibliography, and two unpublished works. Villa’s first collection, Have Come, Am Here (1942), is a 127-section serial poem divided into a set of “Lyric Poems” and “Divine Poems.” The poems adopt different forms, such as sonnets, free verse, and various unexpected rhyme schemes. The subjects are grand: God, Nature, Beauty, Love, and Art:
17
First, a poem must be magical,
Then musical as a sea-gull.
It must be a brightness moving
And hold secret a bird’s flowering.
It must be slender as a bell,
And it must hold fire as well.
It must have the wisdom of bows
And it must kneel like a rose.
It must be able to hear
The luminance of dove and deer.
It must be able to hide
What it seeks, like a bride.
And over all I would like to hover
God, smiling from the poem’s cover. (12)
Like many of his poems, the first line grabs the reader’s attention while the sonic movements—from “magical” to “musical” to “sea-gull”—create a beautifully rich texture. Throughout, his poems are elegant sound machines that hold the fire of wisdom. His poems hide what they seek; which is to say, their message is embedded within language, image, sound, syntax and rhythm. Have Come, Am Here ends with a note on what Villa termed “Reversed Consonance”:
The author is pleased to introduce in this book a new method of rhyming, a method which has never been used in the history of English poetry, nor in any poetry […] The principle involved is that of reversed consonance. The last sounded consonants of the last syllable, or the last principal consonants of a word, are reversed for the corresponding rhyme. Thus, a rhyme for near would be run; or rain, green, reign. For light—tell, tall, tale, steal, etc. (74)
Although this method is only used in seven of the poems, it reveals Villa’s desire to “make it new” and establish himself as an innovative modernist. In re-reading the poems that utilize reversed consonance, the rhyme scheme does feel “less obtrusive on the ear” as Villa claims, but it doesn’t necessarily feel “subtler and stricter” (75) than traditional consonance.
This formal innovation leads directly to his second collection, ordinarily titled Volume Two (1949), which opens with a “note on the Commas”:
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 eccentricity; and they are 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: enabling each word to attain a fuller tonal value, and the line movement to become more measured. (78)
Villa compares this method to Seurat’s “architectonic and measured pointillism,” making no reference to e.e. cummings, who was an obvious influence. The connection to Seurat is furthered when Villa describes how the commas add a “visual distinction”:
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Purity. . . before,I,
Stepped,to,the,Door,and,
At,the,Door—
And,as,I,passed,
Out,the,Door. . .
Line,orbit,locus:
Peril,deed,and,map,of,
Blaze! Peril,
Of,immediate,
Hunter: daze,
Whirl,of,supreme,
Migrator: pull,of,his,
Gravite,anchor!
Fact,act,of,me,
To,me: Knitter:
Cleaver,of,me,Intact. (93)
Many of the themes from his first collection continue in Volume Two and are transformed by the commas. Villa passes through the doors of poetic perception to map the line, orbit, and locus of his spirit’s “blaze.” He is a master weaver; the poem above appears in a section titled “Divine Poems,” which continues the series that began in Have Come, Am Here. Connecting the two books through the title of his second book and through the actual content suggests that Villa thought in terms larger than the single “book.” Volume Two also includes a new section called “Aphorisms,” composed of short, poetic moments: “Poetry— / The,fight,for,insight. (113)”; “Inlight.” (125); “There,is,a,poetry,of,shades, / As,exacting, / As,Braille,to,the,fingertips (127).” To me, Volume Two represents Villa’s greatest contribution to modernist poetry. He undeniably crafted an exacting poetry of sensual and spiritual shades, achieving a visual and sonic Braille for the ear and the eye.
The next collection featured is Selected Poems and New (1958), which includes selected (and sometimes revised) poems from Villa’s first two volumes, a selection of his early poems (which are quite dull), new poems, and “Adaptations.” The new poems don’t do anything particularly “new”; they mostly re-iterate his main themes and formal innovations (more comma poems). What is new in terms of Villa’s work are his “Adaptations”: “The adaptations are poems: from prose. They are experiments in the conversion of prose, through technical manipulation, into poems with line movement, focus, and shape, as against loose verse” (147). Villa transformed letters, journals, notebooks, magazine and newspaper articles, and advertisements into poems, excising words when needed but never adding anything extra. Although he mentions William Carlos Williams’ insight that “prose can be a laboratory for metrics,” Villa turns prose into poetry, as opposed to Williams’ exploration of the poetic possibilities of prose. Villa also notes that a few of the adaptations are collages, a term he claims to have borrowed from painting; he doesn’t mention Marianne Moore’s possible influence. Unlike Moore’s electric collages, Villa’s collages basically read like prose with line breaks.
The final collection in Doveglion, Appasionata: Poems in Priase of Love (1979), is as disappointing as Villa’s adaptations. The love poems recycle tired tropes with the saddest hints of Villa’s innovation: “Lift me up: touch me: look at me. / I will sing” (208).
Thankfully, Doveglion ends on an exciting note by featuring two unpublished works. The first is an explanation of a versification method called “Duo-Technique”:
In traditional verse, the overall technique tension is vertical or up and down […] To create proper torque and tension, I moved out further to the right by creating an aisle or partition to create a horizontal tension. The horizontal tension is never there, except linguistically. Now by employing duo-technique, the poet can have two ways of creating the torque to modulate the sound and music of the poem: vertically and horizontally […] resulting in making spark-leaps across the gap between left and right sides. (228)
Villa likens this discovery to Cubism while not mentioning other poets who similarly experimented with horizontal torque, such as Pound, Crane, Williams, Mallarmé, Zukofsky, Cummings, and Olson. Nevertheless, Villa’s “Duo-Technique” does show his passion for prosody and his ability to clearly explain his formal insight. Reading the surprisingly engaging sample poems in this section truly illustrates how the technique creates torque and “spark-leaps” across the entire horizon of the page.
Finally, the collection ends with Villa’s “Xocerisms,” a word that combines his first name in Russian (Xoce) and “aphorism.” He described these aphorisms as “pithy, inventive, philosophical insights told with a dash of Tabasco.” According to Villa, aphorisms are a “higher art form than poetry” (241-2). While Villa wrote thousands of Xocerisms, the editors present us with about 150, ranging in subject from God and Nature, Sex and Art, Poetry and Craft: “Form is to Substance what a wet T-Shirt is to a fine body”; “A poem is language built to the structure of a flower”; “To find the language that cuts, may hurt—yet heals, gives joy, gives light” (247-8).
Doveglion presents the range of Villa’s poetic innovation and the intensity of his vision. His understanding of prosody and his hunger to explore all possible prosodic effects solidifies his re-blossoming reputation as an essential poet of the 20th century. In addition, his concern for such themes as God, Art, Beauty, Love, and Wisdom marks his role as an important bridge between Metaphysical and Modernist poetry. It’s tempting to write that Villa’s vision was limitless; however, his unwavering belief that social, cultural, and historical concerns had no place in poetry reveals his blind spots. Even though Villa stopped writing poetry after his last major publication in 1958 because he claimed he had “reached his poetic limit,” he turned to creating a philosophy of poetry and left behind a treasury of aphoristic wisdom for future generations of poets. Doveglion generously brings that wisdom into the 21st century.
