REREADING PAST WRIT To make a book of anthology is never been easy for the people behind the creation

of the book which was composed of the works of many Filipino writers. September 1984 Prof. Edna Z. Manlapaz started to conceptualize the project with her staff, they gathered an immense members of poems, critical essays and biological data coming from magazines, newspapers , school publication ,early anthologies and individual authors collection. Their focused eventually was putting out the indispensable index to Filipino poetry and verse in English.(1905- 1950) The anthology was first called Rereading Past Writ because under various critical persuasions most poems and verses over half century have been largely unread. ( ang kanilang pamagat paras a akin ay angkop din sa kasalukuyang kalagayan ng mga akdang pinoy sapagkat karamihan sa mga tao ngayon ay nawiwili na sa makabagong pamamaraan ng pamumuhay at halos ginugugol nila ang kanilang panahon sa ating makabagong teknolohiya kaya sa pagkakaroon ng anthology book na binubuo ng mga sinulat ng mga Pilipino ay inaanyayahan tayong muling buklatin at imulat an gating isip sa literatura ng nakaraang siglo at dekada sapagkat kailangan nating malaman kung ano ang ating pinagmulan at kung bakit nga ba tayo nagkaroon ng mga akda. Dapat nating isaisip sa ating pagbabasa ang mga naiambag ng ating mga kauna-unahang manunulat sa wikang Filipino at Engles.) *Trinidad Tarrosa Calls the language of my blood * This led eventually to the anthology s final title, Man of Earth by Amador T. Daguio in 1932 when he was only twenty.

if the wind passes by says that poem, Must I stoop/ I might have been the bamboo,/ but I will be a man.
*Fernando Maramag- in 1912 calls This scene so Fair between East and West. *The Anthology consist of eighty poets and 3330 poems and verses from English

*verse- A verse is formally a single line in a metrical composition e.g. poetry. However, the word has come to represent any division or grouping of words in such a composition, which traditionally had been referred to as a stanza. The word "verse" is commonly used in lieu of "poetry" to distinguish it from prose. Where the common unit of poetry, i.e., verse, is based on meter or rhyme, the common unit of prose is purely grammatical, such as a sentence or paragraph. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verse_(poetry)

-Verse then depends quite simply on the language of its time and does not transform its site; the subject or prose content is all. *poetry-Poetry (from the [Greek] 'poiesis'/ [poieo/ ], a making: a forming, creating, or the art of poetry, or a poem) is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns, lyrics, or prose poetry. It is published in dedicated magazines (the longest established being Poetry and Oxford Poetry), individual collections and wider anthologies. At first Filipino poetry was in English because it merely adopted the imperial tongue and its poetic and critical tradition. *Mariano Velazquez de la Cadena- is the sense considered distinctly from the language -verse is not obsessed with language; its burden and glory is the sense. They said that the language is broken kaya sa aking pagkakaintindi sinabi nila na a broken language cannot speak to us sapagkat hindi pa nagagaing maayos ang pagkakaugnay ng mga salita na nagdudulot ng disorganisasyon sa pagbubuo ng mga pangungusap. But then the poet begins to discover his own native clearing within the language where the words become no longer foreign or vernacular, but poems own word. The poetic time covered by the anthology is halif century from 1905. -Villas poems from 1929 to 1939 are gathered in many voices, but he wrote his best poems afterwards. -Francisco Tonogbanua born 1900 continued to write well into sixties. Our poets simply wrote as they could in English as early as 1905. -First half century of poetry and verse was essentially romantic but that throughout the same period there were individual efforts, but that throughout the same period there were individual poetic efforts at first tentative, vague and confused . 1. either to transform English Romantic diction into a native idiom 2. or to break away from its formal molds and models its conventions and themes. Villa learned from e.e cummings Angela Manalang from Emily Dickson A.E. Litacio from Dorothy Parker Periodizing; gathered the poets into three groups:

1. Who cleared the poetic ground as it were 2. Those who wrote mostly in the thirties 3. Those who wrote mostly afterwards -they depend on chronology(the poets date of birth) and salient features of his diction and theme. How did they select poems? Their interest lay in poems rather than the poets many of whom are now quite unknown. *Frances Anna Bennett may be the sole exception her father is American her mother was a filipina but they have a little information on her and her piece Saturday Night *Evelyn Nora wrote verses example is written to One Present in the Absence of Another *Antoniode Irureta Goyena- The Reina Cristiana and his sister Isabels Bliss and on Lifes threshold

They consider also: *The matter of the individual poets own formal development- the selection if possible must at least indicate its course *The matter of the poets own distinctive poetic subject-the selection if possible must at least be representative of his corpus *The matter of literary history- the selection must show a certain range of poetic forms and experiments and where possible, indicate the relations between the poet and his milieu. -Anatolio LitonjuaA child looks at its mother- exemplary sentimental verse -Natividad Marquez- the sampaguita -> sets a kind of standard for fantastic and children verse -Fernando Ma. Guerrero-1873 -Toribia Mano- 1920 -Ilio- born in 1913 -Daguio- off the Aleutian islands, Poet in Equinox -Oscar de Zuniga Love poems for Vi he represents the New critical poetry -Manuel Viray- After this Exile

Most writer included: Villa, Maximo Ramos, Bienvenido N. Santos (The wounded stag), Daguio, and De Zuniga y y y y y The Filipino mind was colonized by the language- first by Spanish and then the English. Many of their words, now rooted in our own native language, have become our eyes and often we see only what would permit us to see. Because language is simply the most powerful of ideological machine its medium and message being one. The great challenge for any poet is to forge new language from a given natural medium as his own instrument insight The poet masters language from within because he criticizes- brings to a crisis, to division and judgement the realities that the language would so create and impose as to make it seem no other are responsible. The Philippines Herald(1920) only public ground which is an English-language news paper who were all American Herald was the first Filipino daily in English.) The Philippine Free Press publish the high school poet Carlos P. Romulos The Elect Free press gave Rodolfo Dato the most number of poems (21) for this first anthology. y The reader of the poem must be as exacting and sensitive as the poet and I think it must be like that because if you read without the sensitiveness to what you are reading like the poem probably you just only read the piece without appreciating or understanding the whole thing in the poem. During the time of those veteran writers during the Spanish time I observed that most of the content of their writings were about the country or the Inang Bayan and most sort of information during their time was the newspaper and magazine on which it still continue to happened on the recent time