Self Publishing, a poem by Ouyang Yu

By Ouyang Yu
In a way, everything is self publishing. When you open your mouth to talk, you are self
publishing because you don’t want someone else to speak for you even if he or she were
the speech writer for Howard or Bush or Mao Zedong. When the rain decides to fall it is
self publishing, on a regional scale, sometimes on a statewide scale. You can’t dismiss it
as unworthily self publishing because it doesn’t fall on a national scale or international
scale. Rivers in the world are self publishing on a daily and nightly basis. Even a little
creek is self publishing when it winds its way through an industrial zone clogged with
toxicity and waste. Birds never remain quiet because they don’t get paid for calling, their
ways of self publishing that never is actually recorded in human history, not even in
birds’ history, and when sometimes it does get recorded as in relaxation music they still
don’t get paid and they still keep singing, their ways of self publishing. Some great self
publishers include James Joyce Marcel Proust Anais Nin Margaret Atwood William
Blake Virginia Woolf D.H. Lawrence Walter Whitman Mark Twain Lord Byron Percy
Bysshe Shelley Ouyang and Yu, even Benjamin Britten had to found English Opera
Group in 1947 and the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948 “partly (though not solely) to perform
his own works” (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Britten). That’s self
publishing. If self publishing is a crime, issue proceedings against us and take us all to an
international court where the presiding judge is a well-published and award-winning
author who has never self published (Shame on Him!) and will sentence us all to a
lifetime imprisonment of self publishers and a deathtime of self publishers
Now listen, to the rain self publishing again as it did 3000 million years ago, on the page
that is my roof

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