A Filipino poet, short-story writer, a critic, and a painter, Jose Garcia Villa (1908 - 1997) authored one of the famous literature, " Footnote to Youth". Jose Garcia Villa was born in Singalong, Manila. His parents were Simeon Villa and Guia Garcia. His father worked as the personal physician of General Emilio Aguinaldo. He graduated from the University of the Philippines in 1929. Villa first studied medicine, but later on, he switched to law, and as a law student he wrote short stories and poetry. His ideas on literature were provocative. Some of his works, titled “Man Songs,” was a series of erotic verses. Back then, that was so controversial that the UP administrators suspended him from the university. In that same year, however, Villa won a prize for the best short story of the year from the Philippine Free Press.
Although he was largely known as a Filipino poet, Villa spent 67 years of his life in the United States. He began writing short stories while studying at the University of New Mexico. He published his stories and poems in American literary magazines. Villa received critical recognition from one of his poems, “Have Come, Am Here” when it published in New York in 1942. Soon enough, honors and awards were given to him: Guggenheim (1942), Bolligen Fellowship (1951-52), Shelly Memorial Award (1958), and Letters Awards.
At some point, Villa switched from short-story writing to poetry. After publishing Footnote to Youth in 1933, he turned all his attention to poetry. In the year 1949, Villa created a poetic style he called “comma poems”, wherein commas are placed after every word. He was known to have introduced the “reversed consonance rhyme scheme” in his poems, as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks, especially commas, which got him the nickname as the Comma Poet.
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