Readers of London’s highbrow Horizon are triple-annealed againstliterary stresses. Even so, some must look twice or thrice at a clutchof 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 explanatorynote:
“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 commasappear in the poems functionally, and thus not for eccentricity; andthey are there also poetically, that is to say, not in their prosefunction. These poems were conceived with commas, as ‘comma poems,’ inwhich the commas are an integral and essential part of the medium:regulating the poem’s verbal density and time movement: enabling eachword to attain a fuller tone value, and the line movement to becomemore measured. The method may be compared to Seurat’s* architectonicand measured pointillism—where the points of colour are themselves themedium of expression, and therefore functional and valid, as medium ofart and as medium of personality. Only the uninitiate would complainthat Seurat should have painted in strokes.”
And, for, the, uninitiate, that, was, that.
*French neo-impressionist painter (1859-91).