Doveglion: Collected Poems

by José García Villa, Luis H. Francia (Introduction), John Edwin Cowen (Editor)

The centennial edition of major Filipino writer José Garcia Villa's collected poetry

Known as the "Pope of Greenwich Village," José Garcia Villa had a special status as the only Asian poet among a group of modern literary giants in 1940s New York that included W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, and a young Gore Vidal. But beyond his exotic ethnicity, Villa was a global poet who was admired for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems" (Marianne Moore). Doveglion (Villa's pen name for dove, eagle, and lion) contains Villa's collected poetry, including rare and previously unpublished material.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Asian American

304 pages, Paperback

First published July 29, 2008

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

[Anima · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The case of Jose Garcia Villa, an exiled Filipino poet who lived in the U.S. from 1930 to 1997, illustrates the predicament of the subaltern, neocolonized artist embedded in what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the literary field” (see The Rules of Art). The significance and ultimate value of Villa’s
accomplishment, as epitomized in Doveglion: Collected Poems (2008), can only be fully appraised by contextualizing the genesis and structuring of his themes, styles, and artistic manifestoes in the fraught historical-political relations between the imperial hegemon, the United States, and the
dependent, peripheral socioeconomic formation, the Philippines. .."
(Jose Garcia Villa—Critique of a Subaltern Poetics*, E. San Juan, Jr.)

LYRICS: II
17
"First, a poem must be magical,
Then musical as a seagull.
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."

20
" I can not speak of the beauty of love
Without wonder. It is my belief of spring
That makes music invincible and poetry
A thing of goldest green.."

29
"Silence is Thought converging,
Unprecipitate, like
Dancer on tight wire balancing,
Transitive, budlike,

Till- her act finished-in
One lovely jump skips
She to the floor, bending
To make her bows, dips

Herself in bright applause-
Then silence is
No more. Now it is the rose
Called Speech"

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most intriguing formal innovators in twentieth century poetry, Villa was--for the most part--a devotional poet whose compact lyrics employ a strange metric device: commas after each word, filling the short gaps between words with small, pertinent silences, as if each word is an island. For those to whom this prosodic curiosity seems clumsy or intrusive, Villa gives permission to ignore punctuation. But it is a remarkable, quirky rhythm that fills each poem with hesitation and emphatic articulations. A pretty brilliant poet whose work has been sadly ignored. One of my favorites.

[E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

At this best, this Filipino-American modernist poet is the successor of John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way their poems express a complex spirituality. Doveglion (Villa's pen name) does not settle, but wrestles with God, as in this poem:

God fears the poems of
Such as I!
Who am neither blind
Nor sly:

For that though I praise Him
I accuse!
His inhuman Godhood
I refuse.

For that though I seek Him
I repel Him!
Repulsion so great
As to unnerve Him.

Dissolution of God
Is my end:
That His Nullity
I may forfend.

Dissolution of the
Spermless God:
To the Aristocracy
Of the Living Blood.

His poems also experiment with punctuation and spacing. Such as this one:

Crisp,is,God's,anger--
It,cracks,with,Tenderness.
He,is,so,much,Sun,
He,must,in,the,end,caress.

I,caused,His,anger,once,--
He,smote,the,dark,into,me,fierce!
But,then,it,broke--
He,placed,me,again,amongst,His,peers!

Note: he writes about plenty of things other than God, those are just the poems I was most drawn to.

[eepî · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't mean to read this cover to cover but I did. I was just here because I was trying to find the " coconut nipple poem." It sounded very intriguing to me. I was trying to find that, bounce and read other books instead. But I was hooked and kept reading.

I've never been a good poem reader and the collection of poems I've read in my life is almost next to nothing, a surprise I like this collection. Somehow, I felt connected how JGV play with words and form of his poems, some of it. I don't mind the commas.

If it weren't for the last part, linguistics, I'd give this 5 stars. I mean he seemed so serious about his poetry and his system how he created his craft and how he graduated 3 times now in literature after doing short short stories and poetry, so the last part of this collection sounded ridiculous to me. It was written like every modern two-liner poetry bestseller you see on bookstores today albeit some of the last poems are kind of funny unironically. Maybe it's satire; he meant that part to be what he called Peotry (bad poetry). If he did, then I'm fooled.

[ally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best writer my country has produced. Obsessed with the flamboyance and flowery nature of his texts, even if some don’t seem meant to be understood. I’ve been familiar with JGV’s works since high school, but digging into the pieces in this collection felt even more fulfilling. It’s admirable how he experimented with text and made it work as much as he did. Bring back male yearners.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book makes me cry from time to time.. sigh.. thank you JGV..

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

from Have Come, Am Here
12 '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.'

26 'To make icecream chrysantheme
Mix Christ and chrysanthemums

In a bowl of turkiz amethyst.
To make icecream chrysantheme.

But since Christ is not so easy
(You must hunt him first among

The white shadows of black birds
With a mask upon your shoulder

And a rose upon your eyes!)—
Since Christ is not so easy

If you come Christless from the
Hunt, though chrysanthemums be

Gold and bright as poems, and
Carry hugest themes—naught

Can they avail, ah they will fail,
And then your lips must say

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
To icecream chrysantheme.'

from Volume Two
81 'Before,one,becomes,One,
The,labor,is,prodigious.
The,labor,of,un-oneing,

To,become,a,One!
The,precision,of,un-oneing,
The,procedure,of,dissembling,

Is,the,process,of,expiation,
For,the,sin,of,Nothing.
This,Absurdity,is,Unification.'

97 'What,is,equal,to,
Is,equal,to,

But,not,it.
Equality,is,

Achieved,relation,
But,the,equation,

Is,not,Identity.
Identity,is,

Solitary,Unit.'

from Aphorisms
110 ‘What,is,told,in,diamond,
Is,not,glass—
It,has,more,than,
Planetary,elegance.’

114 ‘A,hero,is,alive,and,is,made,dead.
The,correct,punctuation,
To,historical,grammar.’

from New and Selected Poems
143 ‘Learn,laws. Build,
A,great,theory’s,rose.’

143 ‘If,a,rose,strikes—
What,would,you,do.’

145 ‘Commit,rose.
Or,
Commit,diamond.’

146 ‘Abstract,as,a,Chinese,tear.’

[⚢ · Rating 3 out of 5]

my favourites in the collection:

To a Lady Going to Antipolo

In Antipolo there will be many young men who will come to you. You will like them because their tongues will be honeyed and their feet light. You will forget me. I shall be forgotten by you whom I cannot forget.
As you forget me I shall tap my fingers on my breast, calling for you.
I shall talk to you through trees, through the arms of dancers, through sweet words uttered by many lovers.
The arms of dancers round you shall be my arms.
The eyes of men admiring you shall be my eyes.
I have many arms, many eyes.
It is that, loving you, I have become many lovers.
In fancy, because I do not want other men's arms about you, I have made the many dancers myself.
As they clasp you round the waist, it shall be I holding you.
The words of love they shall tell you are not theirs but mine.
I am many lovers.
For you, if you also love me, you will find me in many dancers, in their bodies, in their words.
I am many lovers because I love you.

7

Between God's eyelashes I look at you,
Contend with the Lord to love you,
In this house without death I break His skull
I ache, I ache to love you.

I will batter God's skull God's skull God's
skull!
I will batter it till He love you
And out of Him I'll dash I'll dash
To thy coasts, O mortal flesh.

He'll be broken He'll be broken He'll be
broken
By my force of love He'll be broken
And when I reach your side O Eve
You'll break me you'll break me you'll break
me.

16

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.

[yoonie · Rating 4 out of 5]

SIS WBK,, but i’m not going to pretend like i didn’t skim through the little aphorisms on the end because of how fleeting they are. nevertheless, doveglion’s work is stunningly intimate, sensual, and brilliant at humanizing divinity. how he fraternizes with god is honestly so daring and it makes sense. definitely an underrated poet—underrated for being a poc in an american literary scene dominated by white men in his time, and because he was not as political as other literary giants in filo history.

[Lora Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Villa's poetry is experimental, and you can hear in his work this creative anxiety to echo western voices in search of his own. To me, it's a respectable labor of forming a self during a time when colonization was at its peak. Villa dissected his identity, both personal and cultural, without fear of the inevitability to be "westernized," maybe even embracing it as a way to break through new territories in his art form and self expression. He was a cosmopolitan.

My own creative interpretation of his seventh lyric from this collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dp_O....

[Kayleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

José García Villa's sensitivity to language, showcased in his playfulness with words and sounds within his poems, brings a delightful other-ness to the English language. His aphorisms felt unduly self-assured to me, but the rest of this collection was engaging and thought-provoking.

[Lyuedgie Mollejon]

reading

[Peter]

"I saw God dead, but smiling"

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Villa’s poems is like Moses encountering the burning bush: proof of the divine in an equation of light.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

130

Much,beauty,is,less,than,the,face,of,
My,dark,hero. His,under,is,pure,
Lightning. His,under,is,the,socket,
Of,the,sun. Not,Christ,the,Fox,not,
Christ,the,Lord,His,beauty,is,too,
Sly,too,meek. But,Christ,Oppositor,
Christ,Foeman: The,true,dark,Hero.
He,with,the,three-eyèd,thunders,he,
With,the,rigorous,terrors: this,
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.

134

When,I,was,no,bigger,than,a,huge,
Star,in,my,self,I,began,to,write,
My,
Theology,
Of,rose,and,
Tiger: till,I,burned,with,their,
Pure,and,Rage. Then,was,I,Wrath-
Ful,
And,most,
Gentle: most,
Dark,and,yet,most,Lit: in,me,an,
Eye,there,grew: springing,Vision,
Its,
Gold,and,
Its,wars. Then,
I,knew,the,Lord,was,not,my,Creator!
—Not,He,the,Unbegotten—but,I,saw,
The,
Creator,
Was,I—and,
I,began,to,Die,and,I,began,to,Grow.

41

To make icecream chrysantheme
Mix Christ and chrysanthemums
In a bowl of turkiz amethyst.
To make icecream chrysantheme.
But since Christ is not so easy
(You must hunt him first among
The white shadows of black birds
With a mask upon your shoulder
And a rose upon your eyes!)—
Since Christ is not so easy
If you come Christless from the
Hunt, though chrysanthemums be
Gold and bright as poems, and
Carry hugest themes—naught
Can they avail, ah they will fail,
And then your lips must say
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
To icecream chrysantheme.

60

The way my ideas think me
Is the way I unthink God.
As in the name of heaven I make hell
That is the way the Lord says me.
And all is adventure and danger
And I roll Him off cliffs and mountains
But fast as I am to push Him off
Fast am I to reach Him below.
And it may be then His turn to push me off,
I wait breathless for that terrible second:
And if He push me not, I turn around in anger:
“O art thou the God I would have!”
Then He pushes me and I plunge down, down!
And when He comes to help me up
I put my arms around Him, saying, “Brother,
Brother.”…This is the way we are.

*

[J B · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, a collection that contains some of the best and worst poems I've ever read.