The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Jose Garcia Villa

by José García Villa, Eileen Tabios (Editor), Jessica Hagedorn (Foreword Writer)

Kaya is proud to present The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Jose Garcia Villa, a collection of poetry and prose by the celebrated Filipino American writer, edited by Eileen Tabios and with a foreword by Jessica Hagedorn. At the height of his career, in the forties and fifties, Villa's writings earned him prizes, fellowships, and lavish praise from such literary luminaries as Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, and Mark Van Doren. Yet, his work has been out of the public eye for more than thirty years, and out of print for more than fifteen. Although named a National Artist in the Philippines where he was born, Villa remains largely unknown here in the United States, where his reputation among the elite of modernist experimental poets was made.

Kaya's republication of Villa's writings both recovers and rediscovers the work of this fierce iconoclast for a new generation. Included are reprints of his major poems and representatives from each of his significant experiments, as well as short stories, critical work, and paintings. A critical component of the book are essays by contemporary Filipino and Filipino American writers including: Luis Cabalquinto, Nick Carbo, Jonathan Chua, Luis Francia, Nick Joaquin, E. San Juan, and Alfred Yuson. New force in the Asian American literary world, Eileen Tabios, has edited the volume, and Jessica Hagedorn, celebrated poet, novelist, and playwright, contributes a thoughtful foreword.

Genres: Poetry

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

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.)

Reviews

[Kaion · Rating 4 out of 5]

April is Poetry Month!

In my desire to be Nude
I clothed myself in fire: —
Burned down my walls, my roof,
Burned all these down.

Emerged myself supremely lean
Unsheathed like a holy knife.
With only His Hand to find
To hold me beyond annul.

And found Him found Him found Him
Found the Hand to hold me up!
He held me like a burning poem
And waved me all over the world.

The Anchored Angel is both a reintroduction of Jose Garcia Villa (1908-1997) as a forgotten American modernist poet and a reconsideration of him as an iconic Filipino writer and critic. Born to a well-to-do Nationalistic family, Villa left the Philippines after his shockingly sexual imagery (sample line: “I shall kiss a coconut because it is the nipple of a woman”) led to his being thrown out of university and being fined for obscenity. In the United States, he became a respected modernist poet — introducing reverse consonance and the comma poem — before retiring to the teaching of poetry workshops and a semi-obscurity that didn’t lift until he was reclaimed by Asian-American criticism in the late nineties.

I was introduced to Villa with his semi-autobiographical “Untitled Story” in the anthology Charlie Chan is Dead , in which his poetic, impressionistic sensibility informs the alienation of a young man whose difficult relationship with his wealthy father has sent him overseas to New York. In contrast, the two other stories included in The Anchored Angel are about country people, yet Villa shows a similarly delicate touch in portraying the rural, and drawing out what is archetypal or even mythical of ordinary life. There’s a touch of the gothic Villa employs in his story “The Fence,” wherein a neighborly enmity takes on monstrous power over two generations, whilst retaining something of the feel of a folk story.

As a poet, Villa has something of Dickinson’s spiritual ecstasy and Cumming’s modernist experimentation. I prefer his earlier poems; as he increasingly eschewed what he called the “content” of poetry for “form”, there crept in something of the mechanistic or bloodlessness to his expression. His repeated imagery of burning and ascension, God-like, is related to his desire to embrace the purity of language — to separate, blade-like, is to make it arise anew. Villa frames this desire as part of his aim as an artist to find the “essential ‘I’… the very force and dignity of man,” a force he equates with Christ's apocalyptic power in his poem "Much,beauty,is,less,than,the,face,of":

[..]
Man's,under,is,pure,lightning. This,
Man's,under,is,the,socket,of,the,
Sun. After,pure,eyes,have,peeled.

Off,skin,who,can,gaze,unburned? Who,
Can,stand,unbowed? Well,be,perceived,
And,well,perceive. Receive,be,received.

Yet it is this process of shedding, or remaking English as a vehicle of expression apart from itself as the language of institution (of the colonizer), that is the interesting part. Purity, achieved, is boring.

Coming from prominent Filipino/Filipino-American writers, the essays included in The Anchored Angel underline Villa’s role in championing Filipino literature in English and his mixed legacy as an “icon” & “National Artist” from the colonial-American era. They also tend more towards the personal remembrances than I would prefer; there’s only so much fawning over Villa’s vanity and love of gin martinis one can pretend to be interesting. The later essays do get around to talking about how Villa’s work intersects with post-colonialism and why that has ironically, caused him to be neglected by both modernist and Asian-American critics by the end of his life (though some contributors who came from the modernist background would have been appreciated).

That being said, Eileen Tabios has compiled a solid introduction to the work of Jose Garcia Villa, who believed in language as communion with the spiritual universe. Of whom Cummings paid the honor of saying “he isn’t looking/he is seeing”. Villa, the self-appointed Dove-eagle-lion of the country Doveglion—beyond the dominion of land (“commerce, politics, agriculture”), a country of the soul. Rating: 3.5 stars

[John Ray Catingub · Rating 3 out of 5]

José Garcia Villa is an anomalic Filipino-American writer whose poetry goes over my head, whose prose I heartily enjoy, and whose esteem among American contemporaries (the Lost Generation, the Beat Poets, etc) is surprising. The essays about him and his contribution to both American and Filipino literature were eye-opening though I wish there would have been more of his work. The great sadness about early 20th century Filipino writers is that what is available is either not enough or exorbitantly expensive. I hope to read more of JGV's prose though I personally prefer his more-straightforward literary descendants.

[Teshamae · Rating 5 out of 5]

I fell in love with Jose Garcia Villa, a Filipino-American writer, after reading these poems and short stories. He has such a beautiful way of phrasing things. Plus, this provokes a reader to consider how America treated Filipinos after 50 years of colonization. This book is made even richer by a section of essays other leading writers and thinkers wrote about Villa's impact on the world.

[Duvhe · Rating 5 out of 5]

How to read it????

[Reyna Crysha · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to read?

[Jannaaxq · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't read

[Erin Heisler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Villa's poetry! His modernist approach to God, religion and existence is interesting as well as daring. I love that he attempted new techniques when writing and explained his process to his readers.

I found the choice of critics included in this anthology to be intriguing and puzzling at times. There was a lot of focus on his personality--sometimes more so than the writing itself. But it did shed light on Villa, his process and his motives.

I would definitely love to read more of Villa's works in the future.

[John]

amazing