In the first three books Villa published in the United States he introduced three literary innovations: reversed consonance rhymes, the comma poem, and adaptations (known today as found poems). Villa’s poetry innovation, Duo-Technique, is described in this centennial edition for the first time. With the benefit of Villa’s handwritten notes, classroom lecture notes, and actual poems depicting duo-technique, I have reconstructed the poet’s explanation of this new versification method he created three decades ago.
Villa once remarked to his workshop students that “duo-technique is a masterful breakthrough in modern-day versification and is as important to poetry as Cubism is to art. I must write something about it. Only you [John Cowen, Bob King, Mort Malkin, and Larry Francia] know about my invention of duo-technique.”
On January 17, 1978, at a poetry workshop session given in his Greenwich Village apartment, Villa proceeded to give a brief explanation of his duo-technique versification method, prefacing his lecture by stating that he began work on his new technique during one of the previous semesters after failing to successfully rewrite an adaptation assignment. Villa’s explanation of duo-technique is stated succinctly below:
In all good verse, a tension like an inner nerve is pulling the lines technically together. Each tension goes from line to line, pulling a line downward toward its next line while, at the same time, pulling that line toward the preceding line. In traditional verse, the overall technical tension is vertical or up and down. Also, there’s a tension affected by pivot words at the end of each line. As I tried to reversify the poem to improve the tension using the normal way to versify up and down, vertically, it didn’t sound right to me. The lines ran too fast with the normal technique. With the vertical technique alone, I could not modulate the line to satisfy my ear. To create the proper torque and tension, I moved out further to the right by creating an aisle or partition to create a horizontal tension. The horizontal tension is never there, except linguistically. Now by employing duo-technique, the poet can have two ways of creating the torque to modulate the sound and music of the poem: vertically and horizontally. The use of both techniques or duo-technique is a successful exploration of the medium, resulting in making spark-leaps across the gap between left and right sides.
An example of this vertical and horizontal movement is illustrated in a brief inscription, in the form of a little poem,* Villa wrote for a longtime student, Robert L. King, which employs duo-technique:
| Breve Ars Humana | |
| Let a man | |
| contain | an angel! |
| Yet let him | |
| not be | fully angel— |
| Though he | |
| Contain! | a Full Angel. |
In a note, Villa lists five essential criteria for achieving this technique:
The year 1976 marks the first recorded example of Villa’s conscious use of duo-technique. This new method appears below in the form of an adaptation based on four lines from W. S. Merwin’s twenty-one-line poem “Late Snow,” which appeared on page 37 of the April 12, 1976, edition of The New Yorker. However, I also retrieved an earlier poem written by Villa that was apparently an unconscious attempt at using duo-technique, published in Manila in 1941 in Poems by Doveglion. This poem also follows, with its prescient title “Poem Designed by a Bird.”
The unpublished adaptations that follow are based on snippets of prose and/or poems that Villa found pleasing to his ear or senses, but which were not satisfying enough to him as crafted. It should also be noted that the adaptations that follow were not intended for publication but were merely used by Villa as models to illustrate the craft and value of the duo-technique method to a small group of workshop students. These adaptations, however, are important vehicles because they illustrate how this versification method can enhance the medium and can be used deliberately in the future by poets who practice their craft, as others before them used sprung rhythm, slant rhyme, and the like, to enhance their poem’s meter, rhythm, rhyme, or prosody.
JEC