Poetry is: José Garcia Villa’s Philosophy of Poetry

by José García Villa (Editor), Robert L. King (Editor)

José Garcia Villa, a twentieth century Philippine phenomenon, took by storm the Filipino and American literary establishments, winning wide acclaim for short stories and poems in English.

Turning to poetics — what poetry is and does — he lectured at his Greenwich Village workshops.

Editor Robert King — Villa’s long-time student — has restored these lectures from Villa’s theory of poetry notebooks at Harvard’s Houghton Library. They unfold in plain textbook form and make the case for restoration of lyric poetry divested of prose elements and for an expanded readership of same.

174 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Jose Garcia Villa 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. 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.

(From wikipedia.org, retrieved 14 March 2011. More info here.)