100 KS
'43
(no great cathedral) / far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying
cities," it begins, and the remainder is no joke, no joke at all.
Perhaps
if
one were allowed to believe that at one point or
another a joke was actually going on, it might be rather easier to take
the recent portions of Jose Garcia Villa's
Selected Poems and New.
Except for what I think is the indisputably genuine poetic achievement
of "Have Come,
Am
Here," his first book of verse which appeared
in 1944, Mr. Villa's output has proved quite exasperating. He
has
continued from his second volume the pointless use of commas, in
lieu of spaces between every word in every poem, that continues to
send one howling to an oculist. Some forty-seven of his newest poems
are "adaptations" of portions of prose from
Time,
Princess Marie von
Thurn und Taxis, and other famous writers, arranged in what purport
to be widely varied Marianne Moore-like syllabic stanzas (it's all a
fake, though, if you
really
count the syllables) -the effect of these
adaptations
is
to prove nothing except that well-written prose is harder
to read when broken up into patterns of short lines of varying length
in which it was not designed to be cast. A selection of some thirty:
early lyrics that must have been put aside at
the
time that
Have Come,
Am Here
was assembled completes the volume, save for a chatterboxy
preface, signed by Dame Edith Sitwell, that concludes with an im–
probable superlative about Mr. Villa's poetry, rapping at one's good
humor like an angry, assertive cane.
Mr. Villa's talent was always a peculiar and somewhat limitled
one, and often tended to vitiate the effect of its successes by not letting
well enough alone. For each really fine poem like "Be Beautiful, Noble,
Like the Antique Ant," there would always be many betrayed promises.
For example, the stanza
Dig up Time like a tiger
Dig up the beautiful grave
The grave
is
graveless
And God
is
Godless
is typical of the poet's earlier work. The beautiful first two lines are
not served well by the addition of the two following ones, which,
despite the prior occurrence in the poem of "The tiger
is
tigerless,"
are not even clear mystical English. The echoes of this early strange
union of Emily Dickinson, E. E. Cummings and some of the margins
of Metaphysical devotional poetry are even fewer and farther between
in the new poems than in the second volume, where only rarely did
the eye pick out, from a forest of commas, lines like
