“It is the ,,I,, I write about”: José Garcia Villa’s Conceptualization of the Poet in “A ,,Composition,,”

The poems of José Garcia Villa are eccentric, and it would seem that it is on account of this eccentricity that most scholarship on Villa has thus sharply turned, instead, to Villa’s critical essays on Philippine literature in English so as to excavate from that rich reservoir of thought some small Villean insight capable of furthering a politics-centered reading of Villa’s works. Thus, critics of Villa’s works unintentionally neglect a serious discussion of the themes of Villa’s poetry. Because of this facet of Villean scholarship, this article responds by, first, demonstrating that Villa’s critical essays can be read as philosophical texts which seek to construct a system of Villean thought and, second, by applying this system of philosophical thought to a reading of Villa’s “A ,,Composition,,” a prose poem first published in The Literary Apprentice in 1953. My argument is not only that Villa’s “A ,,Composition,,” is an exercise in self-etiology and self-fashioning, an act of the poetic expression of Villa’s philosophy of the Poet, but also that one can understand more broadly the themes of Villa’s poetry through his bizarre philosophy. Doing so, I suggest, would enable a more robust and nuanced understanding of Villa’s place in Philippine literary history, especially as regards with his “formalism.”