The Text of Life / My 4 LTRS

Four bases—four letters. That is all that is required for life. With the sequencing of the human genome the “Text of Life” had been decoded, and for a moment, thanks to its captivating simplicity and clarity, it looked like writers were now condemned to silence: Everything appeared to have been said. However, even a world composed of the letters C-G-A-T remains as complex and complicated as it ever was.

Unless, that is, the poet and sound performer Nora Gomringer brings some order into the whole affair with her film My 4 LTRS.

Nora Gomringer is a poet, publicist, performance artist and the director of the Villa Concordia in Bamberg. She has published seven volumes of poetry, most recently achduje (2015) and Morbus (2015). She was a poetry lecturer at the universities in Koblenz-Landau, Sheffield and Kiel and performs recitals of her own works. In addition to many other awards and international scholarships, she received the 2011 Jacob Grimm Prize, the 2012 Joachim Ringelnatz Prize for poetry and the 2015 Weilheim Literature Prize and the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.