Four Letters North, by Kathryn Rantala 1 This is the forest entangled the murmuring sun a gap but full flat on arroyos draws a ridge of thought coordinates of contentment bioluminescent on the maps of science and mechanics two birds of …

Read the BIG OTHER poems:
bigother.com/2025/07/17/f...

Translated from the English Check out Translated from the English - Also by Kathryn Rantala <p/>"In <b><i>My Archipelago</i></b> . . . the voice, the repetitions and the surprising turns, a sense of surprise, and in the end, a s...

Buy TRANSLATED FROM THE ENGLISH:
bookshop.org/a/578/979899...

Acquired today: Kathryn Rantala's TRANSLATED FROM THE ENGLISH (Sandy Press), which features Rantala's "Four Letters North," which I published in BIG OTHER in 2025!

Cc: @bigothermag.bsky.social

No More Animal Poems Check out No More Animal Poems - <b><i>No More Animal Poems</i> is a plea and an ode to all creatures great and small.</b></p><i>No More Animal Poems</i> breaks new ground with a genre of eco-poetry t...

Buy NO MORE ANIMAL POEMS:
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Read Oz Hardwick's review of Marc Vincenz's NO MORE ANIMAL POEMS!

(Message me for a review copy, etc.)

Every day is Earth Day! Happy Earth Day!

Reconfiguring a quote from Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW: If they can get you agree to what the choices are, they don't have to worry about what you choose.

How cool is it to receive mail with an Ursula K. Le Guin stamp on it? Very!

"I felt connected to other people's pain. To pain in other centuries. Pain in literature. To spearheads and smoking swords. Touch me and I flame."
—Don DeLillo, VALPARAISO

(Image: Edvard Munch's Smertens blomst (Blossom of Pain), 1898)

Rikki Ducornet on Art, Life, Reading, Writing, the Imagination, and More Happy birthday, Rikki Ducornet! 83, today! Addressing “our culture’s disdain for the artist,” Rikki Ducornet in my podcast with her said, “I think it’s simply a…

Happy birthday, Rikki Ducornet! 83, today!

bigother.com/2026/04/19/r...

"If the nation-state is a force-majeure, it makes itself intelligible not as a force of history or formative condition of political ontology or superstructure of ideology, but rather as a delocalized network of potential kill-zones in the social field."
—Emily Apter

Kathy Acker on Writing, Wonder, Freedom, and More Happy birthday, Kathy Acker! Here are some quotes from her writing:   “Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.&#…

Happy birthday, Kathy Acker!

bigother.com/2026/04/18/k...

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Bob Kaufman on Life, Death, Music, and More Happy birthday, Bob Kaufman! Here are some selections from his writing:   “I want to be anonymous…my ambition is to be completely forgotten.” “My head is a bony guitar,…

Happy birthday, Bob Kaufman!

bigother.com/2026/04/18/b...

"But where the danger is, also grows the saving power."
—Friedrich Hölderlin

(Image: Kay Sage's Danger, Construction Ahead (1940))

Among the many fallacies out there is the fallacy that expertise or even brilliance in one area immediately translates into expertise in another area. Also, what constitutes expertise and brilliance has to be rigorously problematized, to say the least.

"They wanted to bloom
and to bloom is to be beautiful.
But we want to ripen,
and for that we open ourselves to darkness and travail."
—Rainer Maria Rilke

"Love trumps pain is the lesson with which
I'm out of my mind. The sun's going down
slow, in our language. I thank its freighted skull.
As though any other life were possible."
—from Lisa Russ Spaar's "Estival"

(Image: Gerhard Richter's Schädel (Skull), 1983)

“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
—Henry James

(Photo: Erlanger, one of the lunar craters of "eternal darkness")

Imagine if every high profile artist significantly used their power to champion marginalized artists, literary and otherwise. It would be a kind of wealth distribution.

"You have to write what you don't yet know and hope
that in another time you might."
—Martha Ronk

"Develop your legitimate strangeness."
—René Char

(Image: Salvador Dalí's, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937)

"Fact is, silence is the perfect water:
unlike rain it falls from no clouds
to wash our minds, to ease our tired eyes,
to give heart to the thin blades of grass
fighting through the concrete for even air
dirtied by our endless stream of words."
—Philip Levine

(Image: Agnes Martin's Gratitude, 2001)

"We cannot hope to obtain any sort of perfection in a society which is divided into two parts: rich people who rule the world and poor people who obey their orders."
—Leo Tolstoy

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
—Samuel Beckett

(Image: Charles Ray's Plank Piece I and II, 1973)

From the Archives: Eight Poems, by Rae Armantrout Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Rae Armantrout! Celebrate by reading this suite of Armantrout poems we published in 2022! And then read the Armantrout poems we published in 2019, 2020, and ea…

Happy birthday, BIG OTHER contributor Rae Armantrout! Celebrate by reading this suite of Armantrout poems I published in the journal in 2022! And then read the Armantrout poems I published in 2019, 2020, and earlier in 2022, and 2025!

bigother.com/2026/04/13/f...

Cc: @bigothermag.bsky.social

Samuel Beckett on Life, Words, Silence, Nothing, and More Happy birthday, Samuel Beckett! Here are some quotes from his writing:   “Birth was the death of him.”   “We are all born mad. Some remain so.”   &#822…

Happy birthday, Samuel Beckett!

bigother.com/2026/04/13/s...

How are you taking care of yourself? How are you taking care of others? How are others taking care of you?

"[T]o make the thing, [...] that thing that, half-heaven, half-earth, gathers into its gravity only the sum of flight, weighing nothing but arrival."
—Rainer Maria Rilke

(Image: Caspar David Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea (1808-1810))

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke

(Image: J. M. W. Turner's Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842))