The contest started out as a search for the best puplunganon (quotable quotes) in the Waray language. The participants broke the rules and sent in their siday (verses) instead. Without a better choice, the sponsor and the prize donors gave in to the popular trend. Thus, we now have a Siday Contest, perhaps the longest running radio program of the literary kind in this part of the country.

The Siday Contest sponsored by Radio Station DYVL in Tacloban City has been around for more than five years already. From Monday through Saturday, around 7:15 in the morning, the station broadcasts to its audience a choice work in Waray poetry. Daily winners are read during weekdays, and weekly winners are read on Saturdays.

The prize donors for the contest now include the local Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) branch, the Pacanan Insurance Agency, and former Leyte Vice-Governor Aurelio Menzon.

DYVL’s Siday Contest sustains a literary tradition among the people of Leyte and Samar. Its roster of participants perhaps include a thousand names. A few hundreds may have made it as daily winners. But the potential saving grace for the Waray language is a "critical mass" of about 50 contributors, who have been pouring out their creativity and trying to outwit each other with their mastery of the Waray tongue and of the poetic form.

The Waray language is in danger of being swamped or petered out by the more dominant languages such as Tagalog and Cebuano. Indeed, the absence of magazines and publications written in Waray places this language in a precarious position. Yet the threat of extinction of Waray can be significantly averted by such simple acts as sponsoring native poetry contests, folk song contests, folk comedy and drama contests, and related activities that elaborate the uniqueness and promise of the Waray language.

Of course, Waray poetry has its obvious limitations when measured according to current "western" standards of literary criticism. In his preface for a compilation of Lineyte-Samarnon poems in Leyte-Samar Studies in 1974, Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo, a Leyteño writer in English who is based in Silliman University, noted that "... the Waray poets, if this collection were the basis for evaluation, were still languishing in cloying nineteenth century romanticism ... The dominant qualities about the poems are the moralistic obsession and the deadening descriptiveness ... (The) most important parts of speech in any language are the nouns and verbs, (yet the) poems have an abundance of adjectives and adverbs and qualifiers, and the consequence is that most of them are too long."

However, many other writers have contested Dr. Tiempo’s "harsh" comments on Waray poetry. One of them is Dr. David Genotiva, Dr. Tiempo’s former student who is now a language professor at the UP Tacloban College. Dr. Genotiva once commented that poetry in one language must be measured by the poetic demands and yardstick of that language, and not that of another language.

Throughout the ages, the fundamental two-fold functions of poetry have been: 1) to delight, and 2) to instruct. When judged by these literary criteria, it seems obvious that the audience of DYVL’s Siday Contest have been served well.

In the following box in an example of a siday that was both a daily winner and a weekly winner.

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