JOSE GARCIA VILLA

"The Emperor's New Sonnet" by Jose Garcia Villa
in SELECTED POEMS AND NEW
(McDowell, Obolensky, New York, 1942-1958 and Bookmark, Inc., Manila, 1993)

"The Emperors New Sonnet" by Jose Garcia Villa is a blank-page poem.  It's one of his visual poems that "forego the words entirely. For example, there is 'Centipede Sonnet,' consisting entirely of commas; 'Sonnet in Polka Dots,' composed of Capital Os; 'The Emeperor's New Sonnet,' which is a blank page; and 'The Bashful One,' in which a single comma lurks in the lower left of the page.  It is especially in these caprices that the influence of e.e. cummings and Villa's desire to take his work to the next level of meaning are evident." 

It is also a controversial poem. An analysis by "chololuistro" offers a useful summary of how people responded to the poem.

José García Villa (August 5, 1908 – February 7, 1997) was a Filipino poet, literary critic, short story writer, and painter. He was awarded the National Artist of the Philippines title for literature in 1973,^[1] as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing by Conrad Aiken.^[2] He is known to have introduced the "reversed consonance rime scheme" in writing poetry, as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks—especially commas, which made him known as the Comma Poet.^[3] He used the penname Doveglion (derived from "Dove, Eagle, Lion"), based on the characters he derived from himself. These animals were also explored by another poet e.e. cummings in Doveglion, Adventures in Value, a poem dedicated to Villa.^[1]

Photo of the elderly Mr. Villa in his Greenwich City, NYC apartment by Eric Gamalinda