The world is a poem –
I will share one with thee –
The world is a poem –
Won’t thou share one with me?
06.06.95
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Copyright by Minh Tan on listed dated of completion
and published in Perspectives, ISBN 0-9686250-0-2.
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Notes to this poem…
I don’t know if I got my old English right in this poem, but I love it nonetheless because it allowed me to express my love for writing, reciting, listening and, most importantly, sharing poetry between myself and another. I did have a romantic connotation in mind in my inspiration to write the poem, like two lovers reciting poetry to each other, romantic poetry and otherwise. However, my intent was to be any two people sharing poetry and poems of any type with each other, by any means, whether reciting in person or even in emails, which was still in its infancy at the time of the poem’s writing in 1995.
As for the world being a poem, well, whether life was good or bad, I always thought it to be poetic and dramatic like a poem. There was certainly never any shortage of topics about which to compose poems. Poetry and poems were all around just awaiting to be found, that anyone could do it easily so that everyone had the potential to share some, whether their own or belonging to someone else. I saw that universality with poetry, which also inspired me to write this poem.
The O-series of poems are one stanza poems composed before I got onto writing haiku and tanka, and short poetry while in action or traveling by select means like plane or ferry. These poems are 3-9 lines long with at least one rhyming couplet, and not of the short forms just mentioned. For the sake of elegance, I just called the collection One.
Minh Tan's Old Poetry 
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