Jose Garcia Villa, Filipino Poet in the “New World”

It is ironic to find a poet obssessed with uniqueness, singularity, essence, genius, angels, exceptionality, gods, now being swallowed up in the homogenizing universe of cultural commodities and the culture industry. But perhaps this is a fitting and appropriate end: the dissolution of genius, the angelic imagination, in the totality of exchange whose value, while pretending to be absolute, is also absolutely zero. Nihilism may be the authentic vocation of Villa, a nihilism that may abolish art and all poetry, as well as nations, identities, etc. If so, then Villa has finally succeeded and conquered the last bastion of meaning and intelligibility: language that means and signifies nothing. Is our conversation about him also null, nada, devoid of sense or import? If so, then the only logical alternative (to follow Wittgenstein) is silence. –##

REFERENCES

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Arguilla, Manuel, Esteban Nedruda and Teodoro A. Agoncillo. 1940;1973. Literature Under the Commonwealth by Manuel Quezon, Carlos P. Romulo, Salvador P. Lopez, et al. Manila: Philippine Writers League, 1940; rept. Alberto S. Florentino, 1973.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2002. The Rules of Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kunitz, Stanley, ed. 1955. Twentieth Century Authors. First Supplement. New York: H. W. Wilson.

San Juan, E. 1998. “Salvaging the Disappeared Poet: The Case of Jose Garcia Villa.” Unpublished lecture at the University of Michigan, 1989. Accessible in the Website, “The Philippines Matrix Project” —-. 1996. The Philippine Temptation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. —–. 1995. “In Search of Filipino Writing: Reclaiming Whose America?” in The Ethnic Canon. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Villa, Jose Garcia. 2008. Doveglion: Collected Poems. Ed. John Edwin Cowen. New York: Penguin Books. ——. 2002. Essays in Literary Criticism. Ed. Jonathan Chua. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press.

Yu, Timothy. 2004. “The Hand of a Chinese Master: Jose Garcia Villa and Modernist Orientalism.” MELUS 29. Accessible at

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