Harbourwalk Poem W325

Have you ever read –
A book so badly written –
You wanted to write –
A similar one just to
Show how it should have been done?

03.31.19

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Copyright by Minh Tan on listed dated of completion.

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Notes to this poem…

I am talking about a Vietnamese memoir I don’t need to name here but it was so goddamn awful I could teach a full-term class on how not to write using examples from it! As a result of this, I have started my own memoir, which I had thought about doing in the late 1990s, but didn’t because I didn’t like how the story “ended” at the time, even though life was okay. I had hoped some Vietnamese Boat People child refugees (my story) would have stepped up to write one by now, 20 years later as the Viet Nam War and the Boat People are starting to be forgotten. However, none have, at least not with the major focus on growing up in North America, Canada more specifically. I will write it not only for the record, but not to let the latest Vietnamese memoir that might show up in some searches, or have it represent Vietnamese people’s great abilities to tell stories, be this complete clusterfuck of a book I am talking about. Sorry for the swearing but I really just couldn’t find any non-swearing terms sufficient to describe that book.

The W-series poems comprise mostly of haiku or tanka composed during walks I took on the portion of Halifax’s waterfront known as the Harbourwalk, during the warmer months of 2018 & 2019, when the Seabridge was in place.

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