Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng noted in an interview for this issue of PIW, “it is hard to say which language will be suited to which subjects. I wrote a poem in Minnesota while walking in a pumpkin patch with my wife, my daughter and her young husband. This poem had all the elements of recalled memory [back to childhood] and therefore it was written in Vietnamese, yet people reading it said it was more like an English poem (which had been translated into Vietnamese), with its pastoral images of Minnesota, the way memories and existing views were invoked in the same sense of urgency, the lightness in the open quiet music of a Midwest terrain, and perhaps the vernacular that might very well be influenced by John Ashbery, whose poems I took along to Minneapolis with me at that point in time. All of those perhaps.”