The “Dragging Foot” of José Garcia Villa’s Performative “Comma Poems”

Abstract

José Garcia Villa’s “comma poem,” in which he introduces “a new, special and poetic use” for the comma, is arguably the poet’s most contentious innovation. Starting from an appropriation of Leonard Caspar’s description of the comma poems as “demonstrably malfunctional as a dragging foot,” this essay argues that the comma poem was a visual performance whereby Villa dis-oriented and de-naturalized poetic “flows” through a queer/crip aesthetic of hesitation and brokenness. Read as footsteps and/or footnotes, the comma’s minor mark interrupts and dis-ables normative flow, forcing the reader to adopt a nonnormative “gait.” Utilizing Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological theory of “queer orientation,” I examine how the comma poems’ specific incongruity extends beyond modern grammars: anticipating readings of his “foreignness” and “insensitivity” to the English language, Villa performs the essentiality of the “minor mark” through linguistic experimentation. In doing so, he queers not only the “direction” of modern poetry and its canonicity, but also a contemporary politics of recuperation.