José García Villa

Poet, writer

• Born: August 5, 1908
• Birthplace: Singalong, Manila, Philippines
• Died: February 7, 1997
• Place of death: New York, New York

José García Villa was an experimental modernist poet who made significant innovations in poetic form. His work was a major force in the development of creative writing in English in the Philippines.

Area of achievement: Literature

Early Life

Villa was born in Singalong, Manila in the Philippine Islands on August 5, 1908. He was the son of Simeon Villa and Guía García. Villa graduated from the University of the Philippines High School in 1925. Planning to pursue a medical career, he enrolled in pre-med courses at the University of the Philippines. He later changed his concentration to pre-law, but realized that neither medicine nor law suited his interests. Villa realized his true passion was art. He was first attracted to painting, but upon reading Sherman Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, he began writing short stories and poems.

In 1929, he published his first collection of poetry, entitled Man Songs. The experimental, erotic poems caused considerable controversy in the Philippines and resulted in Villa’s suspension from the university. He was also fined for obscenity by the Manila Court of First Instance. Villa’s short story “Mir-i-Nisa” was also published in 1929 and earned him increased recognition as a writer. The Philippine Free Press selected it for its 1929 Best Story of the Year Award. Villa used the prize money from the award to travel to the United States in 1930. He enrolled at the University of New Mexico and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1933. While at the university, he pursued literary studies and was one of the founders of the magazine Clay, where he worked as an editor. During this period, Villa wrote several short stories, several of which were published in American magazines. Edward O’Brien included Villa’s work in his anthology of The Best Short Stories of 1932.

Life’s Work

In 1933, Villa published a collection of his short stories entitled Footnotes to Youth. The collection earned Villa praise both for his literary talent and for his ability to write in a second language. As a Filipino, he was not a native speaker of English. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Villa published several collections of poetry, including Many Voices (1939), Poems (1941), Have Come, Am Here (1942), Selected Poems (1942) and New (1942). In Have Come, Am Here, Villa utilized a new type of poetic rhyming, known as reversed consonance, where the last consonant sound of a word becomes the first consonant of the word in the rhyming pair (for example, following the word “said,” with the word “days”).

In 1942, Villa began doing postgraduate work at Columbia University. His poetry had gained the admiration of many American poets including Conrad Aiken, Richard Eberhart, and Mark Van Doren. Villa received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Writing in 1943. Readers and critics of his day considered him a member of the group of influential writers in New York known as the modernists. This group consisted of E. E. Cummings, Mark Van Doren, Tennessee Williams, W. H. Auden, and Gore Vidal. Villa also used the pen name Doveglion (composed of dove, lion, and eagle) to represent himself and an imaginary country that he claimed as his native land. In 1949, Villa introduced the “comma poem,” in which he placed a comma after each word to control the rhythm and speed. For Villa, the form of the poem was as essential as the content.

From 1949 to 1951, Villa served as associate editor at New Directions Publishing. He directed poetry workshops at City College of New York from 1952 to 1960. He published four books in the 1960s and then stopped writing to devote himself to teaching aspiring poets full-time. From 1963 to 1973, Villa taught at The New School for Social Research. Villa also held private workshops at his apartment for students. Late in his career, Villa served as a cultural attaché to the United Nations and as a cultural advisor to the president of the Philippines.

Villa received two honorary doctorates and many awards, including the Philippines National Artist Award for literature. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997. In 1999, a collection of his work entitled The Anchored Angel helped reintroduce his work to a new audience. In August 2008, there was a Centennial Celebration of Villa in New York City.

Significance

Although Villa’s work is not particularly widely known in the United States, he made significant contributions to poetry and to the short story form. He was the foremost Filipino writer among “artsakists,” a group of people who valued art for its own sake and did not believe it needed a political or social purpose. Villa also played an important role in establishing English-language literature as a Filipino genre and was one of the major modernist poets in the United States. Villa’s innovative and experimental poetry introduced the reversed consonance rhyme scheme into poetry and made punctuation a significant element of poetry.

Bibliography

Espiritu, Augusto Fauni. Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino AmericanIntellectuals. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005. Print. Analyzes works by five Filipino American writers from the viewpoint of diaspora.

Ponce, Martin Joseph. Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and QueerReading. New York: New York UP, 2011. Print. Discusses eroticism in Villa’s poetry, suggesting that he combines poetics and politics in the theme of eroticism.

Villa, José García. Poems 55: The Best Poems of José García Villa. Manila, Phil. Florentino, 1962. Print. Includes poems chosen by Villa as his best, also featuring critical commentary by David Daiches, Richard Eberhart, and Horace Gregory.