Maintenant #68 — Ulf Stolterfoht
What will come, that is at least my impression and probably my wish, is a renaissance of political poetry under changed circumstances. So not as a comeback of the seventies agit-prop, but as a specific mixture of radical lingual form and radical state of mind. I mean mere avant-garde is over and poetry as a statement (or message in a bottle) is over, too. That seems to be o.k. for me. And I really don’t know which lyrical forms will fill this gap, really no idea, What I know is that Great Britain once more is one step ahead. If you look, for instance, at the poems of Sean Bonney or Keston Sutherland, as well as one or two generations before, at the work of J.H. Prynne or Tom Raworth, you will find most of that I dream of.
In the 68th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the German poet Ulf Stolterfoht.
Four poems
then goodbye. // vienna. alone at the guesthouse
‘mercy option’. with problems about standards. fear
of failure. come on words: explode! where is
glossolalia when you need her, the glossary
must be produced. only half-hearted agreement on
the best mnemonic. // düsseldorf in autumn.
the coolest squads for linguistic emergency. pep
talkers sound spielers. can justify surveillance:
for the first time voice prints will be taken, the
rules seem watertight, yet braille will rescue
the words. so efficiently sublime: the normmakers
should not feel all was in vain.
By Ulf Stolterfoht.
The Samizdat Laureate
What has been marginalised is the fact that Burns was an important 18thC political radical and thinker, a seditious revolutionary and a staunch republican. In the last four years of his life he came within a baw hair of being jailed or deported for anti-government activities. Therein lies a tale… Interpreting Burns’s poetry, and making it sound both contemporary and authentic, is a challenge, which I think most sensible poets would back away from, but the verse lends itself to perfomance so the bulk of the work is done for me. I’ve tried to interpret these poems they way I believe Burns MAY have performed them if he was alive today. Burns was so streetwise I’m pretty sure he’d try and make his radical verse pack an explosive punch. More John Lydon than Harry Lauder…
In advance of his Edinburgh Festival show Robert Burns: Not In My Name, Darran Anderson interviews Kevin Williamson.