I Protest - by Ouyang Yu

Poetry
Written By Ouyang Yu
ISLAND | ISSUE 160

Have been dipping
into my
old

journals of the
early sixties
a

mistake. Now I
feel sad
as

shit, but must
admit things
are

much better nowadays
at least
from

my point of view
Is it
really

good to keep
a journal
I

loathe doing it
at the
time

and I get depressed
when I
read

it. But it’s
such a
marvellous

treasure trove. I
have vowed
to

make an entry
a day
throughout

July, so I’ll
stick to
this

but I protest
I
protest* ▼

* Taken verbatim, and rearranged from a paragraph in Christopher Isherwood, Liberation: Diaries, Volume Three: 1970–1983 (Harper/Perennial, 2012), p 249

This poem appeared in Island 160 in 2020. Order a print issue here.

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Ouyang Yu

Ouyang Yu is an award-winning poet and novelist. His first novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, won the 2004 South Australian Festival Award for Innovation in Writing. His third novel, The English Class, won the 2011 NSW Premier's Award, and his 14th collection of poetry, Terminally Poetic (2020), won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Book in the 2021 Queensland Literary Awards. He was shortlisted for the Writer’s Prize in the 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature and won the Fellowship from Creative Australia in late 2021 for writing a documentary novel, now complete in three volumes. And his eighth novel, All the Rivers Run South, was published in December 2023 by Puncher & Wattmann, which is also publishing his ninth novel, The Sun at Eight or Nine in mid-2024. His first collection of short stories, The White Cockatoo Flowers, was published in 2024 with Transit Lounge Publishing.

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