Jose Garcia Villa

Jose Garcia Villa (August 5, 1908 – February 7, 1997) 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 rhyme 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.

https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/jose-garcia-villa/

Considered the leader of Filipino "artsakists" - a group of writers who believe that art should be "for art's sake" - he once said that "art is never a means; it is an end in itself". Villa's poetic style was considered too aggressive at that time so that when he published Man Songs, a series of erotic poems in 1929, he was fined P70 for obscenity by the Manila Court of First Instance. In that same year, however, Villa won the Best Story of the Year from the Philippine Free Press magazine for his "Mir-I-Nisa" and edited/published Philippine Short Stories: Best 25 Short Stories of 1928 - an anthology of Filipino short stories written in English. It is the second anthalogy to have been published in the country after Paz Marquez Benitez's Filipino Love Stories.

Villa used the penname "Doveglion" (derived from dove, eagle, lion), based on the characters he derived from himself. These animals were also explored by the American poet e.e. cummings in his "Doveglion, Adventures in Value" a poem dedicated to Villa. Villa is known to have introduced the "reversed consonance rhyme scheme" in writing poetry as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks- especially commas placed after every word- which mae him known as the "Comma Poet". He was awarded the Philippine National Artist for Literature in 1973, as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing in the Unted States.