Ulf Stolterfoht Book order

The Amme Talks is a conversation between poet and machine. In 2003, poet Ulf Stolterfoht and a chatbot named Amme (which means "wet nurse" in German) met in Berlin. For one week, Stolterfoht interrogated Amme: not just a chatbot, actually, but a steel-and-glass construction with a computer interface, which is connected to a glass of milk, a robotic arm that tips over the glass, and a tube that releases water, as if urinating. Stolterfoht asked Amme--the creation of artist Peter Dittmer--about the nature of authorship and the agency of language; he intended to turn the answers into an essay on poetics. While Amme replied to every question, Stolterfoht observed that the output was "highly self-reflexive, if not entirely self-referential," and impossible for him to assimilate into his writing. He'd hoped to glean something from Amme's performance of an idiosyncratic and mechanical form of human speech. Instead, he stumbled on a remarkable "second-order realism" in which words refer not to things but to themselves. In the dialogue presented in this book, Stolterfoht glimpses something other than what we understand as poetry, something apart from "solipsistic exercises" with language, something like "endlessly liberated speech"--A potential revolution in poetry mounted by a milk-spilling chatbot.

Poetry. Translated from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop. Pen Award for Poetry in Translation, 2008. LINGOS takes as its playground all the cultural baggage of our turn of the century and examines it with a mix of deconstruction, parody and sheer exuberance. The poems flaunt their intent to avoid linearity, prefabricated meaning and the lyrical I. Instead, they cultivate irony, punning, fragmenting, juxtaposing, distorting, and subject everything to an almost compulsive humor--the author and his own methods included. Ulf Stolterfoht was born in 1963 in Stuttgart and now lives in Berlin with his wife and three children. His 3 books of poems are all called Fachsprachen [lingos, jargons, technical terms] and are all published by Urs Engeler Editor: Fachsprachen I-IX (1998), Fachsprachen X-XVIII (2002), which received the Hans-Erich-Nossack-Forderpreis and the Christine Lavant-Preis respectively, and most recently, in 2004, Fachsprachen XIX-XXVII, for which he received the Anna-Seghers-Prize in 2005 and a stipendium to the German Academy in Rome. "Let us only say, that Stolterfoht's poems have something I would count as new possibilities of poetry: an intellectual serenity that is not just witty and satirical, but works with advanced poetic means and proves to be a la hauteur of the satirized subjects"--Jorg Drews.