Notes from the Poetry Workshop of José Garcia Villa, 1970 Part ll

This is the second of a multiple-part series containing the notes I took during a poetry workshop taught by the renowned poet, "The Pope of Greenwich Village," José Garcia Villa, (1907-1996). José, whom I got to know well, was a great teacher, who dedicated the latter decades of his life to the teaching of the art of writing verse.  He intended to publish a book about this subject, but it never materialized.  This makes the publication of these notes, imperfect as they are, all the more important;  scholars, poets and lovers of poetry might well find something of interest here.

                                                                 February 11, 1970

Inlearning: expanding knowledge of the interior
Endopoetics: regarding the essence within
Outlearning expanding exterior knowledge
Exopoetics: technical knowledge
Poema/Logos
Exopoetics, not logos, is what makes a poem art.
Next three weeks: "inlearning" of poetry
Roethke on prosy poems: "These wings are from the wrong nest."
François Mauriac: When a writer has style, it doesn't matter what he has to say.
Eliot: "Ulysses is the most important expression modern times has produced."
Joyce: Intellectual narrowness, but possessed an extreme gift for writing.
Art doesn't require intellect; it requires intelligence.
Ideas merely "show off" in art.
Art doesn't require intellect because its problems can be solved--and only thus: by intelligence.  Doesn't need rationality
Poetry catches meaning unintentionally.
Valéry: It's the lack and the black which create.
Stevens: knowledge of poetry is part science and part theory.
Scholars generalize, artists individualize.
Ned Rorum: "I don't really know anything about music!"  Inner, intuitive knowledge.
Blake: Are artists' rules to be drawn from fools?
Pound: The greatest barrier is set up by teachers who know just a little more than the public.

What follows is José's versification of the February 4th assignment, which he presented after we presented our versions.  I do not know the source of this quote.  I did not record any student version. 

       Give Coleridge one
       vivid word from an old
narrative--
               Let him mix
it with two

       
         in his thought: "out
         of three sounds he will
frame, not
                 a fourth sound,
but a star."


                                                   February 18, 1970


Marshall Mcluhan: The medium is the message.
Loving the medium is what is most important.
When the medium is effective, so is the content;
when the medium is not effective, content has no effect either.
Content is a fractional medium of larger, formal medium.
The medium in which the subject moves is what is most important.
Subjects as such are not literary.
Literary qualities: effects in language
Poetry exists as music, but in the form and medium of language.
Anything can be a subject
Language in itself is anonymous and without personality.
Bad poets practice alchemy in reverse: they touch gold and turn it into lead.
Valéry: the execution of the poem is the poem.
A good poem sometimes surprises with unintentional, metaphysical significance.
The medium is concrete, although what it has produced is not concrete.
Without the success of the concrete medium, there is no expressiveness.
Stevens: One of my ideals is to make everything expressive.  I want to get out of line.
Poetry readings are like trying to win a beauty contest by sending the judges a recording of your voice.
Ned Rorum: Taste, touch, smell are for sex; eyes and ears are for art.
Prose content of poem is not an art factor; not the real meaning of the poem--It is a springboard, like the score of a musical composition:
Transfiguration and magnification of values in performance.
Even when Johnson announced good news it sounded like bad news.
The most expressive writers are the ones with deepest content, but it's the expression that makes it great.
Development and detection of expressiveness is a lifelong task.

The session ended, once again, with our "found poem" versification assignment.  Here is José's version:

       Each flower
owes it to itself
to fade
       for the sake

       of its fruit;
the fruit, unless it
fall and
       die cannot

       assume new
blooms: spring itself
rests on
       winter's grief.


(Source unknown)


To be continued

From the Poetry Workshop of José Garcia Villa, 1970--Part l

1.

José Garcia Villa, a leading poet during the 1940s and 1950s and still read today, (his collected poems were published by Penguin in 2008).  His three major books, Have Come Am Here, published in 1942, Volume ll, published in 1949, and Selected Poems and New, published in 1958, have a prominent place on my bookshelf to this day.  His work received great acclaim from critics and poets alike.  According to Dame Edith Sitwell, “The best of these poems are amongst the most beautiful written in our time.”  He was also the recipient of many awards and was for many years the nominee of the government of The Philippines for a Nobel Prize in literature.

In 1957, he  published a long poem in the Times Literary Supplement entitled, The Anchored Angel.  It was supposed to be followed by Part ll, which, unfortunately, was never completed.  José never wrote a poem again, although he lived for forty more years.

He hardly remained idle, however.  He turned his talent to teaching, just as he turned from painting to the writing of short stories,(Footnote to Youth, 1933, was championed by Sherwood Anderson); from story writing to poetry; and finally, from writing poetry to teaching young authors the essentials of this essential, essentially non-paid profession.  It was clear to us all, that despite his abrasive personality, it was indeed a privilege to be in his class. He was a truly outstanding teacher.

I first met him when my brother, who was an avid admirer, took me to one of his classes at the New School in, I think, 1969.  Villa left teaching at the New School a few years thereafter.  He also taught students at this apartment; these sessions were designed for those  who had more than a passing interest in the composition of poems.

Recently, I found the notes I took during one semester in 1970.  We all thought that he would eventually publish a book about the technique of writing poetry, but this never happened.  Since Villa is still the subject of university study, I thought publishing these notes would prove to be of some interest.  Although some of the material might appear to modern students of poetry to be somewhat outdated, there are still many lessons to be learned from him today.  This is the second (and the major reason) I decided to make them public, namely, those interested in poetry will find, I believe, gems that have been buried in my notebook for nearly fifty years.  (Readers are invited to google an essay of mine, The Poetry of José Garcia Villa, for more background material.)

2,

This is the historic photo taken on November 8, 1948 at the famous Gotham Book Mart on W 49th Street in New York City. (The book store is no longer there.) José is in the back row next to W.H.Auden who is standing on the ladder.  Most of the writers in this picture are still very well known.

3.

José lived in Greenwich Village, on Greenwich Avenue.  I don’t know when he first began renting his apartment there, but by the look of the faded paint on the walls, it had already been a long time before I took my first course with him there in 1970.  (The apartment management periodically offered to paint it, but José would have to move the furniture and clutter around the walls first, which he always declined to do.) It was basically a first floor studio apartment, consisting of a large oblong room with a small kitchen off to the right and a small bedroom off to the left. The room was nearly filled with a large table, around which students sat, with José at the table’s head.  Aside from the chairs around the table, the furniture consisted of two inexpensive brown couches that had seen better days.  I remember a very weird statue to the left, a gift that some artist had given him.

We took turns bringing a bottle of Seagrams gin to each session.  It was placed on a counter in the kitchen; José supplied the paper cups.  We entered the kitchen whenever we needed a drink--which was often.  We always drank it neat.

We begin with my notes from a session in 1970.  I must admit that my notes do not give an accurate indication of the dynamism of the classes.  My mind sometimes wandered; I often doodled on the margin of the page.  This was not José’s fault; I was easily distracted in those days by my own thoughts. I had, of course, no idea that I would be entering my notes into a computer nearly fifty years later.  (Personal computers were the stuff of science fiction in those days.)  I wish my notes were better, but some idea of the sessions comes across nevertheless.  

We begin with the first entry, which is undated; I presume it occurred on February 4, 1970, since my notes for the following weekly session are dated February 11, 1970.

Notes from the Workshop                            
Session One: February 4, 1970

Robert Frost: Poets need a special kind of courage for a special type of punishment. José: it entails more fun than punishment.

Techne=Art

Technique is the means to accomplish this.  Art is greater than technique

For this class, technique is the goal; a poetic constitution; poetics, poetry’s Magna Carta.  The theory of the poem; technical poetics.  Principles underlying art: the how.

Dylan Thomas: The lines of poetry are pieces of poetry moving toward a poem.

Sontag: art reinvents language.

William Faulkner: the goal of the artist is to arrest motion by artificial means.

Technique has to be learned.

Student to Robert Graves, “What is bad poetry?” Graves’s response: “Yours!”

There is good bad poetry, and bad good poetry.  (If really bad, the poems become classics of their kind, as found in “The Stuffed Owl,” a collection of bad poetry.)

Bad good Poetry—good form but should be prose due to content.

Synthetic poems: costume jewelry instead of real gems.

There are many unnecessary poems written by unnecessary poets.

The good poet knows when he fails.

The artist is the cool scientist serving the subtle dreamer.

Valéry:  a poem is a marvelous little crystal system.

Some poems struck terror into Mallermé because they were so beautiful.

Behind bad poetry is the genuine emotion of the bad poet.

Emerson: people don’t deserve good writing because they like bad writing so much.

A poet is expected to do the impossible.

Two basic problems in poetry: 1.Technical; 2. Linguistic

Gide: Every work is a problem solved.

Ortega Y Gasset: writing entails considerable risk—like bull fighting.

The medium is not only a vehicle, but also an obstacle—Mastery and helplessness.

Poetry moves only in harness; a poet wants it to be difficult.

One needs natural facility and acquired difficulty.

Carl Ruggles: if no obstacles, watch out.  Stumbling blocks must become stepping stones.

Lead yourself into chains then try to get out of them--Dance in your chains!

Thomas: Thank God writing is daily more difficult.

Notes: José often ended the class with a “found poem”—José was a true master in this genre, as we shall see.  Here, in the first class, he informs the students about a regular class assignment.  He will write on the board a poem needing correction, or a piece of prose for us to versify.  We had to versify it for the next class, paying special attention to the movement of the lines.  We weren’t allowed to edit the assignment, although some words could be omitted to tighten up the language  He demanded “not just visual order—lines must have the right movement.”  Many of the classes ended with an exercise in versification.  We would write our version on the board; fellow students would then comment.  As one might expect, José revealed the master version, his version, at the end.  He was indeed a true master of versification.  At the end of the first class, he gave an example of one of his "found poems", which follows. I did not record the original source of the prose.

     

                   Light was blue

                        with the color of this bird

                        going through it—

                   And he, between

                   his wings easily

                         turned bluer, where water

                        was, where fish

                   were in water:

                   Where blue coming

                        through blue became something

                        other: became

                   light in circles

                  without stopping

                      until one circle was

                     abruptly his

                 wide, white eye.

(To be continued)