Books: Danger, Poet at Work

Readers of London’s highbrow Horizon are triple-annealed against literary stresses. Even so, some must look twice or thrice at a clutch of verses by José Garcia Villa in the current issue. Sample:

A,living,giant,all,in,little,pieces, Out, of,death’s,kingdom,into,shine— My, dark,hero, out, of, death’s,answers, My, deep,hero, out, of,death’s,mirrors: My,living,brilliant,my,living,garnet.

For punctuational conservatives, Poet Villa provided an explanatory note:

“The reader . . . may be perplexed and puzzled at my use of the comma: it is a new, special and poetic use to which I have put it. The commas appear in the poems functionally, and thus not for eccentricity; and they are there also poetically, that is to say, not in their prose function. These poems were conceived with commas, as ‘comma poems,’ in which the commas are an integral and essential part of the medium: regulating the poem’s verbal density and time movement: enabling each word to attain a fuller tone value, and the line movement to become more measured. The method may be compared to Seurat’s* architectonic and measured pointillism—where the points of colour are themselves the medium of expression, and therefore functional and valid, as medium of art and as medium of personality. Only the uninitiate would complain that Seurat should have painted in strokes.”

And, for, the, uninitiate, that, was, that.

*French neo-impressionist painter (1859-91).