Guest of the ilb 2007
The poet Ulf Stolterfoht
was born in Stuttgart in 1963. He studied German language and
literature and comparative literature in Bochum and Tübingen until
1991. Between 1998 and 2004 he wrote his three-volume magnum opus of
»specialized languages« (I-IX, 1998; X-XVIII, 2002; XIX-XXVII, 2004).
Critics responded to the self-contained lyrical tone with acclaim.
Stolterfoht’s texts are
attributed to the meta-fictional, experimental lyrical tradition of
Samuel Beckett and Oskar Pastior. His poetic project fuses, by means of
a formalistic method of recycling, mismatched chunks of language from
disparate sources – highly specialized languages of the trade and
linguistic theory, works from the literary canon, slang and adolescent
lingo. In doing so, the compilational nature of writing poetry is
highlighted to the point that Kurt Drawert even drew up a »Non author«
as creator of the texts. After publication of the second part,
Stolterfoht explained in an interview: »I have now read ›The Little
Radio Technician‹ books and have written a poem about radio technology
and CB radio. Then there’s a section on cattle and pig breeding in the
new book: I read East German books on state owned enterprise
instructions for pig breeding. So, you know, everything is possible.«
Meanings are constantly
questioned in a game of references, innuendos and quotations while
being subordinated to rhythmic and phonetic patterns. Internal rhyme
functions both provide cohesion and build up rhythm. As acoustic points
of departure, morphemes create an »associative brachiation help«
(Stolterfoht) along with the structure of sentences, by which he
orients himself in his translation of Gertrude Stein’s narrative poem,
»Winning His Way / wie man seine art gewinnt« (2005). Most recently,
Stolterfoht echoed a work by the Argentine writer Juan Filloy in his
»traktat vom widergang« (2005) which he wrote »less with the help of a
dictionary than through the machinery of echoes repeated in German and
in accordance with the rules of chaff«, as he wrote in the afterword.
Stolterfoht has been awarded
many prizes for his work as well as grants: after the bestowal of the
»open mike« in 1994 he received several prizes for young writers,
including the Ernst Meister Prize to foster talent, plus grants from
the Berlin Senate, the federal states of Niedersachsen and
Baden-Württemberg, the foundation Preußische Seehandlung, the Christine
Lavant Poetry Prize, the Anna Seghers Prize, and recently, the Alfred
Gruber Prize. He currently holds a residency at the Villa Massimo in
Rome. The father of three children, he has been living and working as a
poet and translator in Berlin since 1994. A long, ethnological,
seemingly autobiographical poem, »holzrauch über heslach« (Ü: wood
smoke over heslach), is to be published in the near future.
© international literature festival berlin
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