A Preliminary Exploration of Pizarro’s Notion of Poetic Indecorum in Jose Garcia Villa’s Selected Poems

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary exploration of Charito J. Pizarro’s notion of poetic indecorum by applying it to three of Jose Garcia Villa’s poems. Specifically, it uses two criteria that she set within the concept, which are (1) vocabulary mobility, and (2) the switching from syntactic logic to metaphorical logic. Although Villa’s poems have been exhaustively studied, there is practically no application of the notion of poetic indecorum to date. As such, this paper presents a novel way of appraising Villa’s select poems in the context of the two criteria provided.  The paper’s findings reveal that the three selected poems exhibit both vocabulary mobility and switching from syntactic logic to metaphorical logic. In addition, these two criteria functioned as part of the author’s stylistic choice and expansion of meaning. Given these findings, I propose a preliminary definition of what poetic indecorum is in the context of Jose Garcia Villa’s poems Nevertheless, I also argue that it would be worthy to look at other poems, particularly local ones, and subject them to analysis using the same framework. This would, in turn, provide a more thorough discussion on what constitutes and limits the concept of poetic indecorum.