Re: [New-Poetry] Little known 20th C Poet:s: José Garcia Villa

[jforjames at aol.com]

I encountered a few of Villa's poems in old anthology. It was unusual to see any poet with Spanish/Hispanic name in an American/English Poetry anthology of the time. The poems in that particular book were pretty straightforward. More investigation of his work, though, revealed his 'technique' of liberally sprinkling commas between words. Innovative, I guess, but also distracting. All those little black sickles dangling under the text. Depending on typeface chosen the comma can be rather subdued or a more obtrusive mark, and in the o.p. book I picked up at a used bookstore the commas seemed more the latter. 

Alice Notley in Descent of Allete used quote marks in a similar fashion to break up the language/speech into discrete phrases and words, & thus call more attention to the elements (perhaps more attention than they should get). I thought in one book she used = signs in a similar fashion... but I may be confusing her with someone else. It's true that once you've read enough of the heavliy punctuated work it starts to recede and become only intermittantly noticeble...the effect wanes/wears off, you could say. Perhaps these 'excessively divisive techniques' owe something to Dickinson's dashes.

Has anyone written extensively on the 'eccentric' or 'idiosyncratic' uses of punctuation in poetry?

Finnegan

-----Original Message-----
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Sent: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:38 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Little known 20th C Poet:s: José Garcia Villa
0A
Louis Simpson wrote a funny, but sympathetic, essay some years ago about J. G. V.'s career.  He is, by the way, prominent in that famous Gotham Book Mart photo of All Those Poets.  He seems, belatedly, to have been an LangPo precursor. I'll get the book! 

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