Sept. 25 2016, 9:52 p.m. – THE WORKS of two Thomasians poets were among those included in an anthology by a foreign literary publisher, launched last Sept. 24 at the Solidaridad Bookstore in Ermita, Manila.
The book, titled “Poems of Carlomar Arcangel Daoana, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta & Allan Justo Pastrana,” featured literature alumnus Carlomar Arcangel Daoana and Conservatory of Music alumnus Allan Pastrana.
The anthology, which has 50 poems, was published in July 2015. It is the 8th installment in the Asia-Pacific Poetry Series under Vagabond Press, a Sydney- and Tokyo-based independent literary publisher.
Daoana said the anthology stands out because it returns to the basics of writing poetry.
“All of us believe in the edict that before you break the rules, you must know them first. With regard to our practice, there’s a collective sense that we still need to pay attention to craft, to poetic conventions, and see how we can operate within and beyond those limits,” he said in an interview with the Varsitarian.
“We believe that life—and the many experiences that constitute it—still provides us the germ of inspiration for a poem. We don’t see poetry as theoretical exercise but, rather, as an expression of a particular human truth, as cultivated by a lived life,” he said.
Pastrana explained that writing poetry combines rhetorical and experiential aspects.
The anthology itself exhibits “the complex relationship between reality and imagination in a work of art,” he said.
Daoana and Pastrana were joined by Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta of Ateneo de Manila in the anthology.
Katigbak-Lacuesta won first prize in the poetry category of the 2016 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and was hailed as Poet of the Year in the 2016 Nick Joaquin Literary Awards. Cedric Allen P. Sta. Cruz and Nikko Miguel Garcia
