Craft: José Garcia Villa

José Garcia Villa (1908-1997), the so-called “Pope of Greenwich Village,” was stylistically and chronologically somewhere between the Modernists and the Beat Generation. Born in Manilla, the Philippines, Villa was also the only Asian person among those groups of writers.

Gotham Book Mart party for S.W. Osbert Sitwell and Edith Sitwell, Nov. 9, 1948; Front row (l to r): William Benet, Charles Ford, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell. Middle row (l to r) : Stephen Spender, Osbert Sitwell, Dame Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. Back row (l to r) : Marya Zaturenska, Horace Gregory, Tennessee Williams, Richard Eberhart, Gore Vidal, José Garcia Villa, and W.H. Auden

Villa came to the United States in 1930 and studied at the University of New Mexico where he started a literary magazine, Clay. His first book Have Come, Am Here was published in 1942. He made a living as an editor at New Directions from 1949 to 1951, and was cultural attaché to the Philippine mission the United Nations from 1952-1963. He then was director of the poetry workshop at City College from 1952 to 1960. After that he taught poetry workshops at the New School.

Villa: “In my desire to be Nude / I clothed myself in fire”

A book of his collected poems, Doveglion [Dove Eagle Lion] was published by Penguin in 2008. In this book, the breadth of his vision unfolds from early romantic poems to later innovations in style and craft.