Poetic Obituaries: While working as an assistant teacher,

in 1960 he [Nguyen Chi Thien] was imprisoned again after telling Vietnamese school pupils that the end of the Second World War in the East had not come about because of the heroism of Soviet forces in Manchuria, as claimed in their textbooks, but because of American nuclear attacks on Japan. In 1966 he was arrested again and imprisoned until 1977 because of poems he wrote that decried communist oppression. He used his time in jail, much of it spent in solitary confinement, to compose poetry and commit it to memory by reciting it to himself.

After being released in 1977, Thien lived with a friend and wrote down almost 400 poems from memory.

from The Telegraph: Nguyen Chi Thien

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