Tagalog Poetry
Indigenous Expressions

TEXTULA 1
by Vim Nadera

Short Message Service (SMS), more popularly known as text, became the most favorite pastime of our thoughtful but not confrontational culture. Approximately 50 million text messages are sent and received every day in this country making it the center of texting in the world. This fact helped me in proposing a project that would make pre-hispanic literature a postmodern phenomenon.

Via TEXTANAGA! TEXTANAGA is a literary contest focusing on writing a tanaga – a quatrain with seven syllables per line – that is the oldest form of poetry in the Philippines. The Committee on Literary Arts (CLA), at the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), adopted it as its flagship undertaking during the National Arts Month 2003. Since this contest was implemented in February 2003 the contestants were asked to write and text a tanaga that is romantic. With a little help from the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL), Filipinas Institute of Translation (FIT), and LIKHAAN: The U.P. Institute of Creative Writing (ICW), we at the CLA, received 10,000 tanagas that year). Because of the unexpected influx of entries via Cellular Essentials.Ink.1, instead of one, we chose two, first placers a week. Here are the eight “Textmakata ng Linggo” winners:

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The initial success of this project gave birth to DALITEXT in August 2003; this time “love of country” was the theme. That month of national language, we collected 30,000 “dalits” or quatrains that are both octosyllabic and patriotic. If through TEXTANAGA, we were able to discover new Jose Corazon de Jesuses, via DALITEXT, we found new Huseng Batutes:

Tagalog Poetry and other Filipino poems