“Insomniac Soliloquy,” by Julian Randall
Death might as well be my father’s pen name indecent hours ragged on his breath and I of course am his for knowing the night is no place for the softness even of an eye
Death might as well be my father’s pen name indecent hours ragged on his breath and I of course am his for knowing the night is no place for the softness even of an eye
“Just historically, a lot of poets have had a bad time in their forties. Writers start publishing in their late twenties or early thirties—I think that’s when most poets probably begin to publish. I started a little bit earlier than that. At some level, I feel as though I’ve had very lucky innings, and I suppose I’m thinking about myself: when is it going to stop, or has it already stopped? How am I going to keep myself honest?”
By producing work that lectures but does not necessarily converse with its viewers, DinéYazhí offers visitors a taste of Native peoples’ colonial experience: forever on the receiving end of (often unsolicited) information, of change, of aggression.
When was the first time you saw the sun? Not its winding tendrils, or its luminous glow, or even its radiant essence shining down upon your skin. Not its glare, or its intensity, or its resplendent effulgence—but it.
In a moment in which our country’s various wars, Revolutionary, Civil, World, and otherwise, are trawled for something to give meaning to our present calamities, studying the Kellogg brothers’ era and milieu is a refreshing and much-needed reminder that much of the reason why daily life looks the way it does owes not to generals or presidents, but to the works of scientists and businesspeople.