Jan Krisha A Tubog

BSA-2B Prof. Napoleon Tanlioco

The Life and Works of Francisco “Franz” Arcellana

Francisco "Franz" Arcellana (Zacarias Eugene Francisco Quino Arcellana) was a Filipino
writer, poet, essayist, critic, journalist and teacher. He was born in aka Frank V. Sta. Cruz,
Manila. He is the fourth of 18 children of Jose Arcellana y Cabaneiro and Epifanio Quino. He
was married to Emerenciana Yuvienco with whom he has six children, one of whom, Juaniyo is
an essayist, poet and fictionist. He received his first schooling in Tondo. The idea of writing
occurred to him at the Tondo Intermediate School but it was at the Manila West High School
(later Torres High School) that he took up writing actively as staff member of The Torres Torch,
the school organ.

In 1932 Arcellana entered the University of the Philippines (UP) as a pre-medicine

student and graduated in 1939 with a bachelor of philosophy in degree. In his junior year, mainly
because of the publication of his “trilogy of the turtles” in the Literary Apprentice, Arcellana was
invited to join the UP Writers Club by Manuel Arguilla – who at that time was already a campus
literary figure. In 1934, he edited and published Expression, a quarterly of experimental writing.
It caught the attention of Jose Garcia Villa who started a correspondence with Arcellana. It also
spawned the Veronicans, a group of 13 pre-WWII who rebelled against traditional forms and
themes in Philippine literature.

Arcellana went on to medical school after receiving his bachelor's degree while holding
jobs in Herald Midweek Magazine, where his weekly column “Art and Life” (later retitled “Life
and Letters”) appeared, and in Philcross, the publication of the Philippine Red Cross. The war
stopped his schooling. After the war, he continued working in media and publishing and began a
career in the academe. He was manager of the International News Service and the editor of This
Week. He joined the UP Department of English and Comparative Literature and served as
adviser of the Philippine Collegian and director of the UP Creative Writing Center, 1979- 1982.
Under a Rockefeller Foundation grant he became a fellow in creative writing, 1956- 1957, at the
University of Iowa and Breadloaf Writers' Conference.

In 1932 Arcellana published his first story. “The Man Who Could Be Poe” in Graphic
while still a student at Torres High School. The following year two of his short stories, “Death is
a Factory” and “Lina,” were included in Jose Garcia Villa's honor roll. During the 1930's, which
he calls his most productive period, he wrote his most significant stories including, “Now Sleeps
the Crimson Petal” cited in 1938 by Villa as the year's best. He also began writing poetry at this
time, many of them appearing in Philippine Collegian, Graphic and Herald Midweek Magazine.
 He is considered an important progenitor of the modern Filipino short story in English.
Arcellana pioneered the development of the short story as a lyrical prose-poetic form within
Filipino literature. His works are now often taught in tertiary-level-syllabi in the Philippines.

Some of his works have been translated into Tagalog, Malaysian, Italian, German and
Russian, and many have been anthologized. Two major collections of his works are: Selected
Stories, 1962, and The Francisco Arcellana Sampler, 1990. He also edited the Philippine PEN
Anthology of Short Stories, 1962, and Fifteen Stories: Story Masters 5, 1973. Arcellana credits
Erskine Caldwell and Whit Burnett as influences. From 1928 to 1939, 14 of his short stories
were included in Jose Garcia Villa's honor roll. His short story “The Flowers of May” won
second prize in 1951 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature. Another short story,
“Wing of Madness,” placed second in the Philippines Free Press literary contest in 1953, He also
received the first award in art criticism from the Art Association of the Philippines in 1954, the
Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan award from the city government of Manila in 1981, and the
Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas for English fiction from the Unyon ng mga Manunulat
sa Pilipino (UMPIL) in 1988. He was conferred a doctorate in humane letters, honoris causa, by
the UP in 1989. He was proclaimed National Artist in Literature in 1990 – L.R. Lacuesta and
R.C. Lucero

Arcellana's published books include:

 Selected Stories (1963)

 Poetry and Politics: The State of Original Writing in English in the Philippines Today
(1979)
 The Francisco Arcellana Sampler (1991).
 The Life and Works of Jose Garcia Villa

Jose Garcia Villa, a Filipino poet, critic, short story writer and painter, is an important
person to recognize during Filipino American History Month. Villa was born in 1907 in the
Philippine Islands. His early path did not involve poetry. Instead he began a pre-medical course
of study at the University of the Philippines, eventually switching to pre-law. After some time,
Villa recognized that his true passion was in the creative arts, and his career as a writer began.

In 1929, he published a collection of erotic poems called Man Songs. This collection was
met with some controversy. But that same year, he was selected for the Best Story of the Year
from the Philippine Free Press magazine for his story called Mir-l-Nisa. Villa moved from the
university in the Philippines to attend the University of New Mexico where he went on to found
Clay, a “mimeograph literary magazine.” After finishing his BA there, he moved to Columbia
University for his post-graduate education.

Aside from publishing various collections of poetry, Villa also added to the world of
poetic style, introducing a new rhyme scheme called “reversed consonance.” As Villa explained,
“The last sounded consonants of the last syllable, or the last principal consonant of a word, are
reversed for the corresponding rhyme. Thus, a rhyme for near would be run; or rain, green,
reign.” Villa also wrote something he called “comma poems,” where a comma is included after
each word in the poem. As he explained in the preface to his Volume Two, “The commas are an
integral and essential part of the medium: regulating the poem’s verbal density and time
movement: enabling each word to attain a fuller tonal value, and the line movement to become
more measured.”

Villa has won numerous awards, including the 1973 National Artist of the Philippines for
literature. His work in both poetry and challenging traditional poetic style continues to have an
impact in modern poetry, both for members of the poetry community and other Asian American
writers.Villa first published Philippine Short Stories: Best 25 Short Stories of 1928 in 1929, an
anthology of Filipino short stories written in English literature English that were mostly
published in the literary magazine Philippine Free Press for that year. It is the second anthology
to have been published in the Philippines, after Philippine Love Stories by editor Paz Márquez-
Benítez in 1927.

His first collection of short stories that he had written were published under the title
Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others in 1933; while in 1939, Villa published
Many Voices, his first collection poems, followed by Poems by Doveglion in 1941. Other
collections of poems include Have Come, Am Here (1942) and Volume Two (1949; the year he
edited The Doveglion Book of Philippine Poetry in English from 1910). Three years later, he
released a follow-up for The Portable Villa entitled The Essential Villa. Villa, however, went
under "self-exile" after the 1960s, even though he was nominated for several major literary
awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This was perhaps because of oppositions between
his formalism (literature) formalist style and the advocates of proletarian literature, who
misjudged him as a petty bourgeois. Villa only "resurfaced" in 1993 with an anthology entitled
Charlie Chan Is Dead, which was edited by Jessica Hagedorn.

Several reprints of Villa's past works were done, including Appasionata: Poems in Praise
of Love in 1979, A Parliament of Giraffes (a collection of Villa's poems for young readers, with
Tagalog language Tagalog translation provided by Larry Francia), and The Anchored Angel:
Selected Writings by Villa that was edited by Eileen Tabios with a foreword provided by
Hagedorn (both in 1999).

His popular poems include When I Was No Bigger Than A Huge, an example of his
"comma poems", and The Emperor's New Sonnet (a part of Have Come, Am Here) which is
basically a blank sheet of paper.