Ulf Stolterfoht Poems

berlin: hotbed of the best. a healthy word (like bran)
back to basics for the true believers. strip the language
to its roots. good. friday: working on vocabulary.
enter the body of language with a heartbeat.
...

after years of strictest convention something was
stirring in the previous poem something like a little
breeze just a tiny zephyr however. meanwhile others
know more. it is rumoured that the visceral (traditional
...

did sense (true to statute: save experience)
risk its neck for the disproportion touched by
the guild, spoke of the axe in the cordmaker's
house: ‘swung back - now hack!' Too late:
...

trepanned, the wound man stood attention. armed
with calls to join the knowledge service. that's
how boredom gets routine: studying man's digestion
through the hole in saint martin's stomach.
...

hammer of the idols, or: how to speak with the llama.
quite simply - but those with a past who read it shall
die. ‘this machine kills fascists'. Reform poetry.
but what to do with the kaiser, in contrast
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call to all highly armed bohemians (four works already
ripped to shreds!) in future, the streetwar is to be
fought ‘away from art'. lamentation's polyvocal ohs and ahs
- but one was asphalted in the most concrete way. the
...

opens brightly: sentences exist. deduces claims:
full of words. and that is all there is.
in overtones a merely as what's surely commonly:
good perception of fruit — may well
stand for other things. complete perception of
good fruit — here's how it functions:

like apples eyes and. not to mention pears.
presumes pending corroboration: the apple does not
see itself. in this it's like the eye. you can't tell from
the looks of one (please look at this as a sentence)
it's being looked at by another. 'please look at this as
a sentence' likewise to be looked at as a sentence etc.

'is to say' takes place. aspects apace. one owes/
thanks/is obliged. 'is to mean' goes haywire. also
'more later' belongs here. strong feelings of happiness
through fruit. a newer. a better. a dapper
perhaps. perhaps mere structures but at least crude
and pure. leads from needy to approximate. the word

of fruit in the eye of the beholder. the post as
beam or mote. the sentence of the hereditary
branch. the word of trunk a hybrid. first: the
wrong fruit in the right place. then: the tree as
word — a good sentence. then if I'm not mistaken
the whole tree on the left as strongest branch.

Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
...

what still remains of 'songless' — 'an earnest bird'
brings up. no earnest bird discusses what
seemed essentially the fact. he as it were cancels
himself out. you mentally shake your head. you nod.
...

'borrowed lynx eyes from common rhyme-and-
reason-sense' to decode rest of palimpsests in
shorthand remap concept-scraps with badger
paws and scratch off scrape down recent
coats of varnish 'to compare the more
keen-sightedly the qualities of things.'

corpse in(tro) spection. from words that become
tangible 'once they mightily neighborly groan'
via a lyrico-typical strutting sound 'hybrid'
straight to pseudo-vico´s 'place before time'
—oppressive fragments. but something still
resists. there is a threat of other tones.

attempts in mutant meter. manipulated
metronome. compulsive forte -bark at marked
passages. especially in complex sentences let´s
give self-consciousness to form. and that´s just
the beginning. the current state of sound:
good. the tone gestalt however lags behind.

skirmishes with sense continue. the dogged look of
compound sentences. they are the last to pass
with thanks. thus you disband positions. a foreign
scalp most decorative. thus you unmask a
posture. the barbarism of abstraction. poetry
hurrah! language is allowed to obey vision.

Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
...

your most obedient is doing duty to consider
your art-tissue as non-bombast to presume
to prove to make it known a paragon: make
sure there a new hangars-on. these lines just run
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