Inspiration

"It was not the isolation that was hardest to endure, though it lasted nearly three decades. Nor was it the cold of his cell, where he was often chained naked, nor summer’s blistering heat, nor the rusty shackles that infected his legs, nor the relentless hunger. It was, Nguyen Chi Thien said afterward, the utter lack of access to the written word: no books, no newspapers and, more devastating still for a poet, not so much as a pencil or a scrap of paper."

Margalit Fox, New York Times, on the
recently passed Vietnamese dissident and
poet.
Published: October 7, 2012